According to People (via Yahoo) a museum at Oxford described in the article as "one of the leading museums of anthropology, ethnography and archaeology in the world" is removing some of its pieces (here: "shrunken heads") from display because they "[reinforce] racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the Museum's values today."

It's hard for me not to think of Orwell here and the "memory hole," and how far are we really from these sorts of things being taken out of textbooks, too, to protect students against such stereotypical thinking? This seems to me to be a dangerous thing to do, hiding true things from our history in order to get people to believe the things we deem proper for them. Paternalistic at best, totalitarian at worst.

I get that not many people care about "truth" anymore. The President of the US sure as hell does not. But to see institutions like Oxford show such contempt for it is still bracing. This is the kind of thing that people on the left always said would never happen; and if this is where "political correctness" leads, then we're right to reject it. People should be told the truth, shown the truth, especially by a bloody museum of all places, and then be allowed to come to their own conclusions.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/oxford-museum-removes-controversial-shrunken-153744959.html

Agreed.

How can humanity learn from it's mistakes if we remove the lessons, no mater how harsh?

The point of these changes are not to remove information, but to change the perspective, from the perspective of "the white man taming the savages" which was so common in the colonial days, to a perspective that actually respects the history and culture of the peoples that are being portrayed.

“A lot of people might think about the removal of certain objects or the idea of restitution as a loss, but what we are trying to show is that we aren’t losing anything but creating space for more expansive stories. That is at the heart of decolonisation. We are allowing new avenues of story-telling and ways of being to be highlighted.”

I feel like you are mistaking an objective truth for a subjective one, and holding onto those subjective truths in a reflexive manner which I believe may be well-intentioned, but is in the end still misguided.

It’s never good to erase and rewrite history. We need to learn from it not be blind to it. The Left just keep taking things up a notch. Nothing is really safe anymore.

PC and Cancel Culture are just plain untenable in terms of philosophy and theology.
It will devour itself and those who purport to support that narrative. It breeds hypocrisy as it is solely based on selfishness and closed-mindedness.

Case in point, if you disagree with someone, just cancel them. It doesn't take into the fact that relationships is how we share ideas and understanding.
Whether you believe in God or evolution of human civilization, disagreement is what allows us the "dignity that we were given of free will".

I hope that sanity comes back into cultural and societal idealogies, but I'm afraid at this moment, society wants to take the easy road.

I wonder if you read the article you posted as your source because they clearly state why they will remove the shrunken heads and other pieces from the next exhibition.

They remove these pieces from the next exhibition (btw it's completely normal that museums remove and add pieces to an exhibition because they have much more exhibits than they can actually display) because they think these exhibits don't teach the visitor something about the people they are coming from but instead paint those people in a wrong picture.

So their goal is to actually present these people and cultures more accurately than in past exhibitions. Of course we will se if they achieve their goal but to judge that, we would have to a) see the new exhibition and b) be actuall experts on the topic.

So cool down and let to poor old Orwell rest for a bit, he gets used way to often nowadays.

Yeah a recent poll in my country found that 69% of the population thought that society has now become too politically correct.

The real issue is that not only has the left weaponized certain terms which has led to this insane balance of power shift and allows for regular witch hunts to take place- companies and organizations implementing pre-emptive measures to ensure they appear to conform- but what is really sad, and really upsetting about the whole thing is that it has essentially in certain areas muted discussion completely and limited the scope of topics through fear of reprisal. Even being associated in the same hemisphere as something that's disagreed with is now potentially dangerous.

That then seems to allow on a surface level this unopposed snowball effect to take place, while you have a growing number of people standing by who are unable or unwilling to voice any disagreement. Those people will then vote.

Don't try to use facts and logic. They're too busy complaining that the museum isn't choosing to show what they want. Which is absolutely not in any way like what those cancel culture people do. 

What history was re-written? The post is about one museum removing a shrunken heads display, not re-writing history.

Also, people on the left aren't some organization. The left is a side of a political spectrum that champions equal rights, opportunities, freedoms, and socio-economic policies that benefit the majority population. It has nothing to do with re-writing history.

A lot of the history that is being "rewritten" is actually correction of blatantly false narratives. There isn't any value in "history" that was a lie to begin with.

Case in point: Southern history following the Civil War, which was heavily whitewashed and rewritten to paint the South as heroes and victims when that wasn't the case. That version of history is called the "Lost Cause." That includes the statues are a source of controversy and have been so for at least 40 years. The only history the statues represent was the South shaking its fist defiantly at the Civil Rights movement and intimidating Blacks to "know their place." I'm fine with that crap being relegated to museums with plaques explaining the real historical context of them being constructed as anti-Civil Rights propaganda.