The writer is in Australia.
I HAVE a video which illustrates what the so-called ‘elites’ are doing to Australia, and to most of the Western world: sucking the life blood out of the body politic and pulling down the countries that brought you the Industrial Revolution, which allowed us to escape from the slavery of a subsistence existence.
The video shows a carpet python, brought in for treatment to the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital in Queensland, for which I drive an animal rescue ambulance on Fridays. The python is covered in 500 blood-sucking ticks. In case you are not fond of snakes, it is behind this link.
How have the ‘elites’ latched on to the body politic in so many parts of the world like the ticks on the snake? Through cant – an almost universal social behaviour in 18th and 19th century England, and with us still. (The python recovered, so there is hope that we may also survive, now that we have identified the cause.)
Cant is a good old Anglo Saxon four-letter word that needs reviving. The Oxford Dictionary defines it thus: ‘Hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature’.
Cant was the moral cloud that darkened much of life in England in those two earlier centuries. Lord Byron wrote in 1821: ‘The truth is, the grand primum mobile of England is Cant; Cant political, Cant poetical, Cant religious, Cant moral, but always Cant . . .’
Peter Ackroyd in Volume V of his History of England wrote: ‘Cant was the mirror of self-interest disguised as benevolence, of greed posturing as piety, of a ‘national interest’ that took into account the fortunes of only a few favoured families. Cant encompassed the politician who smiled while remaining a villain; cant was the language of the moral reformer who closed public houses on Sunday . . . Most people, at least those with any self-awareness, were conscious that their professed beliefs and virtues were hot air, but they conspired with others to maintain the fraud.’
One very simple example of woke cant is the decision by much of the Western media to abide by Turkey’s wish to be known as Türkiye. Sounds reasonable, respectful even? But Turkey is the word we use in our language as the name of their country, just as the Turkish word for England is Ingiltere. We do not in English refer to Germany as Deutschland, or as Almanya as they do in Turkish and, as we don’t have an umlaut (ü) in our alphabet, which language is the supposedly Anglophone media using?
We are being smothered in 21st century woke cant. Is it time to call it out for what it is?