Shakespeare, the Arts & Pop Culture

This new page will eventually feature the sharing of my reflections and insights on literature, poetry & pop culture, and how they (with greater or lesser significance or accuracy) comment on the human condition and the human experience of equally precious human beings. Eventually some original poetry will be published on this page, and people are welcome to send in submissions to arts@WilliamBaptisteHumanRightsAndFreedomsForever.com . 

This new page will feature and celebrate classic and previously published Western writers including Shakespeare, who the (unwittingly?) totalitarian-oriented ideologues who are destroying Free Democracy in their ignorance want to remove from public education (as part of their wittingly or unwittingly totalitarian “social  engineering” policies). Apparently they cannot abide the endurance of the traditional Western culture which birthed modern Science and modern Free Democracy, and so they want to make sure future generations are not culturally literate (not knowing the great enduring classics of Western literature will help the ideologues to impute their ideological drivel into young impressionable minds instead).  
 

My first university degree was in Education, with a major in English Literature. While it was my later studies at the Masters and Ph. D. level which put me intimately in touch with the historical and logical Foundational Principles of Human Rights and Democracy identified in my books (which are sampled on this website), it is through the Arts - not only literature & music and visual art which are ancient, but also the newer art of cinema and other media that express "pop culture" - that equally precious human beings express themselves. And other precious human beings (for good or ill) are influenced in the formation of their worldview and self-image or identity partially by the literature, arts, and "popular culture" they are exposed to, which makes it worthwhile to examine the relative merits (and underlying worldview) of particular artistic or pop culture expressions. Enduring artistic expressions of high quality, which really speak to common truths of human experience, can not only shape a particular culture, but can be appreciated cross-culturally, even for centuries, like Shakespeare has been. Just because every human life is equally human and equally precious, and the basic kinds of struggles, hopes and aspirations precious humans had hundreds or thousands of years ago, including struggles to find love or to find freedom or safety, are timeless. 

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I am a Canadian of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural heritage (born a Boyko). Unfortunately, ignorant bigots in political power who judged some humans as of less worth and value than other humans, not only because of our Ukrainian ethnicity but also because of our cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, murdered 7 million of us in the Holodomor Genocide of 1932-33. And even after the Genocide was over, for years more the same government still tried to stamp out distinctives of particularly Ukrainian language and culture. For example, artists and street musicians who played the uniquely Ukrainian stringed musical instrument the bandura were actually rounded up and murdered (it rings very false when some try to claim the many millions of Ukrainian deaths was not a deliberate genocide of the Ukrainian people, since the same Soviet government also repeatedly tried to wipe out distinctive Ukrainian language and culture long afterwards. And since the Soviet Union made money selling 1.7 million tons of grain confiscated at gunpoint from Ukraine during the summer of 1933, while 28,000 Ukrainians per day were dying of starvation at the height of the Holodomor – which loosely translates as “murder by starvation”). 

Thus I have long reflected upon the bigotry which pre-judges some humans as of less worth and value than other humans because of their race/ethnicity or culture or religion, such bigotry in its most vile and murderous form, because 7 million of my fellow Ukrainians, mostly Eastern Rite Christian (like me) farmers, were systematically murdered by the government of the Atheist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which needed to break the Ukrainian spirit of resistance to Soviet totalitarian social engineering in pursuit of their Atheist socialist dream. Ukraine so enthusiastically embraced Christianity in 988 AD, with mass baptisms in rivers, that it is impossible to speak of the history of Ukraine since then without the Christian Church, which pervades the Ukrainian culture. So, the Atheist Soviet Socialists also did their best to entirely stamp out the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, of which I am a member, which was driven so far underground it officially did not exist in the USSR.  But even after the Holodomor Genocide drastically reduced our numbers, decades later 5 million of us came up from what is probably the 20th Century's largest “underground” Church, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 (there were surely many more than 5 million “underground” Christians in Communist China, but not from one Christian denomination).
 

I belong to an ethnic and cultural and religious group which was the target of such vile and murderous bigotry, at the hands of politically Extremist Left totalitarian “social engineering” which worked so hard (and without any regard for Human Rights) to reshape my ancestral homeland into the image of their Atheistic ideology.  A secularized, atheistic ideology which rejects the Christian heritage of the West. Rejects the Christian heritage which taught the previously brutal ancient West that all humans are equally precious and that killing humans is wrong. Because of this, I am particularly sensitive to the recent movements in the West to stamp out or abandon traditional Western cultural values, and in support of this to reject major figures of Western culture and the arts. Including William Shakespeare, who was so influential on Western culture that he was declared “Man of the Millennium” around the turn of the 21st Century. Even though Shakespeare is so cross-culturally relevant that even Japanese directors have made films based on his plays, which so accurately capture and illumine the complexity of the common human condition. 

I cannot help but notice that ignorant bigots who pre-judge people by the color of their skin have even invented new bigoted racist terms against what they ignorantly perceive as a “White” culture and learning which they despise just for being “White.” These bigoted ideologues have utter disdain for the “Dead White Men” who shaped Western culture and the arts, and they are happy to support various movements to have Shakespeare and other “Dead White Men” removed from educational curricula, even though one cannot be culturally literate without knowing Shakespeare. These (unwittingly?) anti-democratic ideologues do not want future generations of Westerners to continue the traditional Western culture which was the only one in the world to develop modern Science and modern Free Democracy. I cannot help but notice that those who have such disdain for traditional Western culture and literature (including Shakespeare) are usually politically Left and unwittingly extremist ideologues, who usually follow the politically Extremist Left (Soviet) precedent of legal human-killing by abortion (instead of being a "Real Left," which belongs in a healthy democracy, the "Real Left" exemplified by U.S. Democrat Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President FDR, who led the United Nations' 1948 production of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which cannot be intelligently interpreted in any way that allows for legal human-killing abortion).  Today's Pro-Choice Extremist Left is too uneducated in Human Rights History to even know that legal human-killing abortion is inherently totalitarian, entirely antithetical to democracy in which every equally precious human gets and equal say or vote, and goes hand-in-hand with totalitarian government throughout history. . .

[Much more to come on this new page under construction . . .]