Diversity Equity Inclusion
Comm itment to EDI or to Truth ?
Commitment to EDI? Or commitment to truth, freedom, excellence?
Parents have been informed of a proposed “Commitment to EDI.” Many are starting to learn more about the true nature of EDI and finding it highly distateful, so why should a whole school be required to commit to it? Surely our commitment should be at a more fundamental level to natural shared values: educational excellence, freedom of thought, childhood innocence, rather than to a highly controversial ideological conformity programme, from the Far Left, which spreads its tentacles through fear?
In the manner of a protection racket, the imposition of EDI in an organisation is not done through reason and after open debate but in management fear of being outside the bullying dogma. It is hard to find any organisation that imposes EDI where some or indeed many staff / members/pupils are not made to feel afraid of expressing views.
A study found that 91% of US academics today feared to express opinions they thought would be controversial. At the height of the McCarthy inquiry into Communism in the 1950s a similar question to academics found just 9% were fearful.
“The Power of the Powerless”
Vaclav Havel. Communist dissident, playwright and eventually Prime Minister Havel gives an insightful portrayal of the way that totalitarian regimes obtain compliance in his character, the greengrocer.
The greengrocer displays the sign “Workers of the World Unite!” in his shop window, not through conviction, but for a quiet life under the Communist authorities. Until one day he refused to participate in the lie.
The West is now emulating the Soviet Bloc which it pitied, outperformed and eventually saw fall. Unbelievably we have become afraid to call out lies and stand for truth. We become slaves to a few words and slogans of the Progressive Left with their forced compliance programmes of EDI and ESG. How many large companies put the slogan Black Lives Matter in their window in 2020? Three words so uncontentious that no one would bother to pronounce them if used neutrally, but which as a slogan represented the ideology that American Blacks were systematically endangered by police and that on that pretext US society needed dismantling. The destructive ideology extended this verdict to the UK despite quite different circumstances. The statistical truth is that a US policeman is 400 times more likely to be killed by a black than an unarmed black killed by a policeman. But how many companies in 2020 showed the courage of the greengrocer?
“Live not by lies” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rod Dreher: author of “Live not by Lies” applies Solzhenitsyn’s resistance to Communism in the 1970s to life in the West today under Progressivism, the socialist religious ideology enforcing EDI, with its oppression of other beliefs, notably Christianity. Prepare to be hated and refuse double-think if you are to maintain your integrity.
Dreher was struck when an elderly East European academic told him that what he was seeing today in the West, with the shutting down of free speech by the socialists of today, “Progressives”, was so similar to what they had experienced under Communism. Dreher contacted other East European academics to ask their opinions, and they all confirmed the similarity of today’s Cancel Culture to life behind the Iron Curtain.