(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) In a leaked report, the United Kingdom’s counterterrorism program warned that reading the greatest authors that England has ever produced—including William Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis and self-declared socialist writer George Orwell—could lead to far-right and white-supremacist radicalization, Fox News reported.
Ironically, the Research Information and Communications Unit, a division within the UK’s “Prevent” counterterrorism program, marked Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984 as a work that could lead citizens to “right-wing extremism.”
Among the key themes of the 1949 novel was a warning about how the government would use fear, propaganda and extreme censorship to coerce citizens into a type of voluntary slavery.
Also included in the list are J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as well as works by Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad.
The RICU even targeted philosophical texts that most people would not encounter outside of an academic setting, like Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government—which laid the framework for what would become American democracy—and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Spectator columnist Douglas Murray, who criticized the RICU’s far-left agenda, had his own best-selling book, The Strange Death of Europe, put on the list. The work criticizes mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe.
The RICU launched the assault on English literature as part of Prevent, a “national safeguarding program that supports people who are at risk of becoming involved with terrorism through radicalization.”
Murray said RICU receives its ideological direction from Hope not Hate, a leftist group (similar to Antifa in America), that sees Brexit supporters and opponents of mass non-European immigration as “far-right” by definition.
With these definitions, the RICU necessarily targets half the nation, or more, judging from the decision to leave the European Union.
