In the immediate aftermath of Britain’s Brexit vote Martin Roth, the (German) director of London’s Victoria & Albert museum announced that he was stepping down.

The Guardian reported:

The Guardian understands that Roth had always intended to stand down in the next year but two factors seem to have played a decision in the timing. One was the Brexit vote, which he was profoundly against. The other was the V&A winning the 2016 museum of the year, which meant he could leave on a high.
…In interviews with the German broadcaster DW, Roth said the vote to leave the EU felt like a “personal defeat” and he had been particularly upset to hear aggressive “war rhetoric” during the referendum campaign.

Those able to remember as far back as early this year might recall that the most aggressive “war rhetoric” of the Brexit campaign came from the Bremainers, most notoriously David Cameron (noted here by the Daily Mirror):

David Cameron has pleaded for Britain to stay in the EU to help prevent the Continent being ripped apart by another conflict….Introduced by Labour ex-Foreign Secretary David Miliband at the British Museum in London, he said: “Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking?…I would never be so rash to make that assumption.”

Oh well.

But back to Roth.

Here’s The Spectator, also from June:

Speaking about the new exhibition, Roth said the public must stand up to nationalism and imagine a world in which there are no countries:
‘When I came here I wanted to make the museum one of global importance. I hope I have managed that. I say this as this exhibition is all about global impact and comes at a time of nationalism, which we must stand up to. As John Lennon said in Imagine: “Imagine there’s no countries”.’

The fact that most people—the dolts— would rather not imagine a world where their countries have been submerged into some post-national swamp doesn’t seem to count for very much with Roth. Instead we must stand up to ‘nationalism’. We?

Writing last week in the Financial Times, Roth returned to his pulpit:

Today’s museums and collections must not only acquire, conserve, interpret and present objects. Given the state of geopolitics today, they have an obligation to focus on how design, art and creativity reflect moral and ethical value systems, and to question bias and political appropriation in all its forms.
Museums cannot be refuges from politics, but rather must be places where arguments for change are contextualised and given depth; they should be platforms from which alternatives can be debated.

Somehow, I suspect that those “alternatives” can only come from the left.

“Where in France”, asks Roth, “is the cultural counterargument to the assault on the core values of the French republic by the National Front?’

Well, the National Front is a less than an attractive party, but since Roth asks, the ‘cultural counterargument’ to it in France is just about everywhere.

Then Roth (channeling Andrei Zhdanov, the man put in charge by Stalin of Soviet culture after the Second World War) warns that “national museums, theatres and opera houses cannot be apolitical. Those who maintain that they can, expose these institutions to malign political influence.

Because everything is political.

Because the fact that these institutions are funded by taxpayers of widely differing views counts for very little.

And because we can be sure that Mr. Roth’s definition of “malign” is scrupulously fair.