Reading certain books is dangerous for our physical and mental wellbeing …

 

Even the chief editors of formerly truly highbrow papers such as the FT now believe that they must garnish their front page with a picture of ‘a famous woman’. This morning it’s either Miz Liz – or Miz Serena Williams. She is ‘news’ because she is planning to retire. I’m sure we all needed to know this, on a morning where we’ve got ‘heatwave’ and ‘inflation’ and the still ongoing blood fight between Truss and Sunak. If you’re an unreconstructed pleb and are into footie, the Red Tops have that famous footie player Giggs on their front page. He’s had eight mistresses, see, and he’s ‘in the dock’ for violent assault. That’s more important than inflation or ‘death by heat’. The usual collection can be found in the usual place (link).

Three articles in our famous broadsheets caught my attention and ignited my ire. Starting with the DT, their lead article is a wail about fiscal drag:

“Households face £30bn stealth raid from Rishi Sunak’s tax freeze – Inflation to push millions more into higher rates of income tax, wiping out impact from leadership frontrunner Liz Truss’s proposed tax cuts” (paywalled link)

The author with the fine British name Szu Ping Chan must be too young to have experienced the yearly complaints about stealth taxes and, yes, fiscal drag which we suffered from during the Chancellorship of a certain Mr Gordon Brown, later PM. I remember only too well that at the time of Sunak’s Autumn Budget we plebs were told all this was necessary, to make up for the enormous sums splashed around to alleviate the damage done to the economy thanks to lockdowns. ‘Tis surpassingly strange that fiscal drag was not an issue for the MSM at that time. Is it an issue now because of the Truss-Sunak theatre?

The other article, right on the DT’s online front page, is a report of another sports ‘celebrity’ who has discovered that homophobia in Commonwealth Nations is our fault:

“Homophobia in the Commonwealth is a legacy of British Empire, says Tom Daley – Olympic diving champion claims in BBC documentary that colonialism was behind many countries still having anti-LGBT laws” (paywalled link)

No surprise that it’s the good old BBC which produced this pile of excrement. When ‘racism’ and ‘slavery’ is no longer sufficient, ‘homophobia’ and good old LGBABCZ must be used. After all, we peasants must be ‘educated’ to feel nothing but shame about our History, and who better to do so than a fresh-faced sports personality who is gay! And would you believe it – Mr Daley ‘discovered’ this all by himself:

“Daley, who came out as gay in 2013, discussed his new documentary on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, explaining how an encounter with a Pakistani pop star was particularly illuminating. He said: “It opened my eyes to so many different things, where the laws came from, where that homophobia stemmed from in the first place and it is a legacy of colonialism and speaking to him, in particular, was very eye-opening.” (paywalled link)

A Pakistani pop star, is it? Pakistan, is it? A muslim country … nuff said! How wonderful to be able to blame this present-day homophobia on British colonial imperialism rather than religion! Did the BBC not speak to historians then? The DT quotes one:

“Dr Zareer Masani, a historian of the British Raj, has questioned the claims covered in Daley’s documentary, suggesting that the story was not simply one of the British removing rights which previously existed. He said: “As a historian, I can assure him that male homosexuality in India carried penalties under both Hindu and sharia Islamic law long before the British Raj – reflecting both local and prevailing Christian sentiment – enacted statutes prohibiting it.” (paywalled link)

This is a fine example showing how the general dumbing-down in schools and academe is working out. It provides the propaganda purveyors, here the BBC, with sufficiently empty minds which they can fill with the latest ‘thing’, here colonial-imperialistic homophobia.

Nobody will be able to contradict this, like the historian quoted above, because future teachers and historians will have been fed the current propaganda because universities have been ‘shielding’ them from dangerous literature. This brings me to the other article which had me weep with anger. It’s an exclusive report in The Times, under the headlines

“Censorship on campus: universities scrap ‘challenging’ books to protect students – Times investigation reveals institutions are removing books containing suicide and slavery from reading lists” (link, paywalled)

Blimey – students are being  ‘protected’ even from just reading about slavery? How can they be expected to talk about this when it’s one of the ’big things’ we must be ashamed of? Ah – but they only need to know what such academic entities like the BBC tell them! Remove all mugs and cups from your vicinity before you read this:

“English students at Aberdeen University are also told they can opt out of discussions on a module about Geoffrey Chaucer and medieval writing as the course “sometimes entails engagement with topics that you may find emotionally challenging”. […] Some of Britain’s most influential authors — including William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie — are among those whose works have been deemed concerning enough to require warnings. […] They are also given content warnings that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream “contains classism” and that The Classic Fairy Tales contains “cruelty to animals and animal death” […] At other British universities, academics have provided students with trigger warnings before studying The Bible, because of “shocking sexual violence”, and Oliver Twist, because of “child abuse”.. ” (link, paywalled)

Are our universities preparing the way to school education which will be akin to the Madrassas where only one approved text will be learned by heart, no debate, no questioning? Is our country, which prided itself on our inventions and our scientific investigations, to become a place where the spirit of questioning has been extinguished because someone might feel ‘upset’? Next, the truly significant paragraph:

“There may well be more instances of lecturers protecting students from challenging literature. Academics attempted to block this newspaper from discovering details about changes to their reading lists, using social media to encourage each other not to comply with requests for information. Some universities refused to disclose any information because of the “potentially negative personal impact” on staff.” (link, paywalled)

The Times provides chapter and verse on this concerted effort of university lecturers to deny these facts to their reporters, for example:

“Royal Holloway, University of London, declined to answer the questions because it would be “likely to endanger the physical or mental health of an individual”. The Times did not ask for any information about individual lecturers.” (link, paywalled)

How on earth can answering these questions ‘endanger the physical health’ of individual staff? The mind boggles! As for endangering their ‘mental health’: crikey! Words fail me! Are they now even too cowardly to stand up for their decisions, made to ‘protect’ their students? 

Given this widespread destruction of knowledge our universities are engaged in it’s no wonder that the MSM, especially the BBC, need celebrity mouthpieces to push their propaganda, especially on subjects like slavery or homophobia. Classic theatre productions better cease because Shakespeare is dangerous – to the actors’ and to our ‘mental’ wellbeing.

When will we see the first bonfires of books because they are dangerous and endangering the ‘mental wellbeing’ of the student generation? (Not that the smartphone generation is actually reading any books anyway …) Might we receive ‘guidance’ next, telling us that we can of course burn the books we have on our shelves if we want to keep warm in the coming winter, when gas and electricity are unavailable? 

Are we on the way to a regime akin to Pol Pot’s where having and reading books is a crime, a ‘hate crime’ even? Is that what the BBC wants? But who will then be capable of formulating the propaganda they put into the mouths of celebrities? Let’s hope that students will become curious and read the ‘forbidden’ books. I certainly did!

 

 

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