By Steve Sailer
02/20/2023
Earlier: Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary: “Only 17% Of Speeches In Shakespeare’s Plays Are By Women”
From The Spectator:
Douglas Murray
Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?
From magazine issue: 18 February 2023… Last weekend the press reported on an analysis done by Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU) in 2019. This analysis looked into social media users described as ‘actively patriotic and proud’. Oh no — anything but actively patriotic and proud!…
In one RICU document a number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation. These include a book on the Rotherham rape gangs, books by Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and — once again — me. Without wanting to beat my own drum, the book of mine that is singled out for this sinister treatment is my 2017 work The Strange Death of Europe. This book spent almost 20 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller lists, has been translated into dozens of languages and was for some time the bestselling non-fiction book in the UK. So that is an awful lot of potential radicals just there.
Like the attempt to delegitimise a book on the ‘grooming’ scandals in the north of England, it seems that RICU is so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem. As I say, if you want a job for life, join a government programme that can end up forming a perfect circle of self-justification in such a fashion.
When I first saw these documents I felt a sort of white-hot anger. But then I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. …
There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.
From the Daily Mail:
Other books, shows and films on list
Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost
The Four Feathers
Lady Hamilton
The Dam Busters
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Great Escape
Zulu
Civilisation
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
House of Cards Trilogy
Sharpe
Ray Mears’ Bushcraft Survival
David Starkey’s Monarchy
Where’s The Man Who Would Be King?
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