Culture

When we are being denied the celebration of our own culture, it is heartening to see a successful example of reviving our culture in the face of Establishment hostility. The English Classical Music Festival founded by Em Marshall has done that.

The collective hatred of our nation’s past by the ruling elite takes practical form in their drive to erase many aspects of our culture, traditions and physical history – and is best illustrated by their physical erasure of our traditional architectural forms and its replacement with drab, soviet-style ‘accommodation’.

The Establishment presents itself as moral and opposed to low things like prejudice, narrow-mindedness and bigotry. This arrogance prevents them questioning whether they have indeed created a multi-racial utopia.

... It left me wondering... does high art really have a civilizing affect on man? Does it humanize him and tame his more violent primordial impulses?

'The architecture that truly defines an age of a people does not do away with the past, it builds
upon it.' Modern Architecture and Ugliness by Edwin Harwood

Theodore Dalrymple's recorded talk - 'Disdain of the Past' - at the 'Another Country - is there a future for Tradition?' Conference - organised by the Traditional Britain Group and the Quarterly Review.

By David Hamilton. High Culture is attacked as upper-class entertainment or a way the ruling elites achieve hegemony over the masses. The elitist argument is ideological rather than factual because working-class people are not barred from attending concerts. Politeness and good manners are essential but if they pay the fee they are entitled to watch a concert.

By David Hamilton. There is confusion about what art is. The qualities that make something art are intrinsic, not external. It is the artifice, the organising of elements, perspective, choice of colour etc, that make it art. The result is obtained by transforming reality and thus nature through human imagination and emotion and is realised by skill and technique.
The word Beauty (or beautiful) is descriptive if used as an adjective to express the response of the beholder to an object, or if used within a clear context; if used as an abstract noun it is universal, and therefore meaningless.

In 2009 Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama commissioning, said that the corporation should encourage "peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking." Yet, according to its own royal charter, the BBC must "be independent in all matters concerning the content of its output". To show how we got to this undemocratic, totalitarian state I give a survey of the war on our culture and history carried on against us in our theatres for over thirty years.