Occidental Partridge

In the latter 1920s, a foundational thinker of Western Marxism lay incarcerated in an Italian prison cell. Much as we’re told now by cheery memes not to ‘waste’ lockdown and learn a new language or stage an opera with sockpuppets, Antonio Gramsci used his time inside to reflect on the state of the stalling International Communist movement. The result was the Prison Notebooks , which identified cultural hegemony as the main obstacle to be surmounted; that bourgeois value systems would have to be displaced by revolutionary ones across society’s institutions, to establish strength in a ‘war of position’ before a ‘war of manoeuvre’ was viable. In the 1960s, the German activist Rudi Dutschke took up the baton, calling for a “ long march through the institutions ”, as a tribute to Chairman Mao’s bloody Long March during the Chinese Civil War. Anyone who has been to a British university has probably encountered the practice of this theory, whether unconsciously or by design.   ...

It's Valentine's Day evening and I have a blind date. I'm sitting in the lobby of a well-known London campus waiting to meet a first-year student who has just finished his day's lectures. OK, it's not really a date in that both parties expect the affair to be entirely platonic, and it's not really blind as we have met once before. But it's only when he spots and waves at me, and I take a second or so to register, that it strikes me I haven't seen his face before. For when we met, on a January demonstration opposite the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, he was wearing a face mask. Having attended a number of pro-Hong Kong marches last year, the sight of masked East Asians had become very much a norm to me. So what compelled me to talk to this young man in particular? Namely, the fact he was also wearing the Chinese Olympic tracksuit, and holding a homemade banner saying "Love China. Love Democracy." My story-senses were tingling: a mainlander...

                     Yesterday I went to the excellent, if rather jading, Culture Under Attack exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. I learnt about instances of the wilful destruction of cultural heritage as an act of war or oppression, from the iconic such as the detonation of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan to the astoundingly unfamiliar such as the Nazi 'Baedeker Raids' aimed at bombing "every building in Brita in marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide" - a disturbing example of how one man's love of culture can be turned into a weapon against culture a few generations later (Baedeker's Great Britain was published 1897) Among the most poignant things was viewing the historic acts of wreckage as ever-more details emerge of the ongoing 'culture-cide' in the Xinjiang Uygur 'Autonomous Region'. CNN had broadcast footage that very morning concerning the mass destruction of Uighur Muslim cemeteries , including an int...