I would say they must be kidding, but you know they're not kidding at all.
This is a month old, but I missed it. The Prevent program was started to identify how Muslims might be led down a path of radicalization. Of course the left has now perverted it into yet another weaponized government agency to attack the right, and it now focuses on "far-right radicalization" and the path to "white nationalism." And what radicalizes people into becoming white nationalists? The Lord of the Rings, Shakespeare, and -- in the most ironically Orwellian entry on a suspicious book list ever -- George Orwell's 1984.It said the works of fiction were 'key texts' for "white nationalists/supremacists".
If you notice what links most of these works -- they're about Britain. British history, British culture. British trains.It is officially radical to be interested in the history and culture of your own f***ing country. All identities must be celebrated and people must be encouraged to think of themselves only as their racial and ethnic identity... except for one race and one ethnicity, which is not permitted to notice they had a history and culture beyond "oppressing marginalized groups."
Douglas Murray's book The Strange Death of the West was put on the list, and he wrote about it.
In any case, it transpires that the programme's attempts to address right-wing extremism were even more inept than some of its attempts to address Islamist extremism. In part this is because the Prevent programme was advised by left-wing activist groups like Hope not Hate. Such groups have long believed that the definition of far-right should encompass, for instance, many people who supported Brexit. From campaigning against the National Front and the BNP, such groups ended up campaigning against Ukip. In other words, they ended up trying to stigmatise opinions that were in many cases (such as on Brexit and immigration) shared by a majority of the British people. Quite the hustle, that.
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! Anyhow, according to RICU there were warning signs if people absorbed information or opinions from 'pro-Brexit and centre-right commentators'. These included Jacob Rees-Mogg, Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle and yours truly. So everybody reading this column is at as much risk of being 'radicalised' as some young Muslim settling down with a tape recording of Ayman al-Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden, and Rees-Mogg becomes the equivalent of a finger--waving imam sending the young off to become martyrs in the cause of Allah. Which is strange because he never came across that way to me when we crossed paths at Conservative Philosophy Group meetings.
I have since been able to look over some of this pathetic material provided at public expense and can confirm that it gets worse. 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. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop 'extremism' in these islands.
This was done in the US of course. Obama ordered the FBI and "national security" agencies to stop paying so much attention to Some People Who Did Something on 9/11 and start focusing all of their energy on tracking the true threat, which is The People Who Objected to Some People Who Did Something on 9/11.
Radical Muslims and jihadi apologists deflected by talking up "the real threat" of white Christians -- it should have been a giveaway that the terrorist sympathizers were pushing a new war on their traditional religious enemy -- and within a matter of years the FBI and CIA were all following the orders of Obama, who himself was following the orders of the Muslim Brotherhood.