Manchester Museum Has Been Ruined by Wokeness

Last weekend, I finally visited the Manchester Museum, having been meaning to go since I moved up north 18 months ago.

What I found was yet another great British institution completely captured by wokeness.

The first exhibit I saw was their "Golden Mummies of Egypt," featuring many examples of mummies from the Graeco-Roman period. This was, of course, framed as being a "multicultural" society.

There were no scans showing inside the mummies either, to preserve their "eternal god-like form" that the Egyptians expected in death. This seemed a far greater priority than educating and inspire the next generation of historians and archeologists. I found further evidence of human remains being removed from view later on in my visit.

The Museum seemed far more concerned with educating their audience on how horrible the British archeologists were that dug up these mummies to begin with. Archibald Sayce, a Victorian archeologist, was accused of using "baseless typologies of race and believ[ing] features of the skull carried information about a person's personality and intelligence," a "simplistic view" that has apparently "since been disproven." All this was taken from a quote of him saying that one mummy had "small, intellectual" features, and looked Greek.

On the first floor, we were subject to a small section on "Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging," which mashed together historical stories with all the usual "LGBT/BIPOC" tales, in opposition to the usual "colonial narratives" of history.

The most eye-rolling one of them all was in the "Movement" section from artist Diala Brisly, who "drew together Syrian experiences of migration both in Roman times and today... visually connecting the ancient and modern movement of people to inspire empathy and belonging."

Here's the poem that accompanied the section in full. Warning for cringe.

Further through the museum, I caught glimpses of the usual climate change, green agenda rubbish that seems to be even more omni-present than LGBT or migrant related propaganda. Apparently, since the 1800s, humans have been "the main cause of climate change."

The peak of this communist rubbish was in the Museum's "Carbon Ruins" exhibit. Put together by school children from across Greater Manchester, it imagined an exhibit from 2050, once we've got rid of all that nasty carbon in the air.

I can't get mad at a future without cheap, shitty plastic toys from China, but what I can seethe about is a future where there aren't any gas boilers because we only use renewable energy (aka totally unreliable and expensively subsidised energy sources), and where tumble dryers have been banned by the government.

Perhaps one of the most grating exhibits was the South Asia Gallery, which Vogue India described as a "salve to the wounds dealt by Britain’s imperialist past." It features the "devastating impact of British colonial policies on South Asia's economy and people, shedding light on the events that led to independence from Britain."

"Many of us grew up with the idea of the lone white male genius who made important breakthroughs" in science, the exhibition claimed. Well yeah. If you live in the UK, or Europe, of course all our historically clever guys were white. A sizeable South Asian presence wasn't in the country until the 20th Century. The entire exhibition is wrapped up in a victim complex, rather than simply celebrating the intelligent Asian figures they promoted, such as the mathematician Ramanujan.

Apparently, the "hidden voices" of British Asians are confronted with the "legacies of colonialism" in the UK, like "old cotton mills, country estates and statues of colonial rulers." Of course, we aren't allowed to celebrate our history in our own country. We're white. It's not permitted.

The exhibition couldn't go on without a section on the South Asian LGBT+ community. How diverse!

For me, the most obvious egotistical exhibit was this; a self-portrait from Muslim artist Azraa Motala. "I often failed to see myself and people like me represented on museum and gallery walls... I wanted to subvert the dominant narrative of Eurocentric male power in portraiture and to raise questions regarding the innate messages of knowledge, subjugation and status visible in our public collections," she writes. Ironic that a Muslim woman is complaining about "male power."

While there remained some enjoyable exhibits at the Manchester Museum, the entire visit for me was tainted. I recently went to Dublin, and the difference between the collections at the National Museums I visited there is night and day. There was no politics. Simply cool stuff, and the details of the history.

I don't think I shall be a patron again of the Manchester Museum.