Orwell observed how some writers are so important that cultural and political “ownership” of their work is fiercely contested. He said this of Dickens and Shakespeare, so would be delighted that he’s now firmly in that camp. But I think he’d be less happy that the weasel word ‘problematic’ is the cover under which his position is now being undermined – as he’d have predicted, by our censorious ‘progressives’.
To this group, certain writers – Eliot, Pound, Kipling, Celine – are clearly beyond the pale, so that any discussion of them has to be prefaced by an impassioned and often inaccurate lecture on their moral and political failings. There is a sense that this is done as much from the fear of not doing so, especially for Pound. The denunciations are highly performative and follow a script, an observation that could be easily made of much discussion with progressives. They seem to speak nervously and miserably, as if under constant observation. Self-censorship is at work: they feel the need to monitor everything and everyone and so assume this applies to them.
I was subjected to one such lecture by some graduate students, whom I and a good friend were chatting to in an Oxford cafe. One chap was English, the other Italian, both were doing DPhils in Literature. The place is Greek-run and, being half-Greek (though not a speaker), I enjoy its atmosphere and coffee. Indeed, we started talking when I overheard them speaking Greek to the English bloke’s Greek girlfriend.
The students maintained that the important thing is quality of writing but, paradoxically, this can only be judged by a strict contemporary “evaluation” of any Right-wing or outdated views. Inevitably, this contextualisation then reveals that said writers are “problematic” and “not as good as XYZ” – usually some figure who fits their sensibilities, and coincidentally one who’s almost always female – or at least better suited to the diversity required by these commissars.
So far, so well known and wearily familiar. The absolute impossibility of literature under such a mindset – one enthusiastically endorsed by graduate students who professed to live for literature – is utterly depressing. We’re in effect dealing with its cancellation
I made a perfunctory effort in observing their complete inconsistency, but things got more interesting when Orwell was discussed. Of course, Orwell famously wrote against their stand, not least in his brilliant defence of Kipling’s literary merit and his refusal to allow orthodoxy to dictate his aesthetic preferences, in Benefit of Clergy.
Unfortunately, Orwell’s stint in the Burmese Imperial Police made him a despicable figure to the students, little better than a Waffen SS or Gestapo officer. True, he’d belatedly retrieved himself by his “eventual writing” in the 1940s, but he’d spent many years performing the dirty work of the British Empire. His famous essay, A Hanging, showed him enthusiastically hands on at it.
I’d honestly never heard such a narrow and limited view, and was intrigued. As a preposterous misrepresentation, it needs little rebuttal. A Hanging is indeed a brilliantly disturbing account of an Indian murderer being hanged, a man who’d have been executed at that time in any country. The essay explores the deep unease Orwell felt about his role, so it’s a lie to claim it shows him uncritically doing his job, let alone revelling in his exertion of British authority.
Such an interpretation shows a shocking lack of understanding. As does the idea that Orwell only recanted any pro-Imperial views in the 1940s; his underrated Burmese Days was published in 1934 and he wrote extensively about his disgust for the job he did in the late 20s and 1930s. Of course, he didn’t only feel disgust, nor would he pretend that the British brought only misery and were unique as imperial exploiters.
What I’m most interested in is how an alternative Orwell was then offered up, a writer who’d accepted the British Empire was “problematic” yet offered a nice comforting view of how nice and comforting life can be – if you agree with the progressives, that is.
Step forward Jan Morris and his trilogy Pax Britannica. Now, I haven’t read this non-fictional account of the British Empire but from background knowledge, it’s not in any way a replacement for Orwell or even remotely comparable. It’s an exhaustive historical work, not a personal creative one. But this trilogy was extolled by the students as what Orwell should have done when discussing empire. There was the implication that Orwell could now be – somewhat thankfully – ignored.
Bizarrely, the Englishman then introduced Joyce, first saying that the man was a lifelong sponger who’d have probably fleeced him, but as a writer was the very model of a pan-European, liberal and open to all cultures. Again, the grubby contradictions and sheer banality of such a perspective are eye-popping – from a DPhil student in perhaps the country’s finest university.
And I’ve a nagging feeling that Jan Morris – a famous case of gender realignment (he ‘transitioned’ to female in 1972) – was picked for the ‘acceptable author’ reasons. That’s the problem with ‘author context’ vetting – as with ‘diversity hires’. Much as I’ve enjoyed Morris’s travel writing, especially Oxford, it’s staggering for this author to be proposed as some alternative to Orwell! Not only in terms of obvious lesser importance, but they’re not remotely comparable in terms of genre or aims. How could any serious reader – let alone one at a leading university – talk such gibberish?
Discussion on Pound and Eliot was even more absurd. Both were (begrudgingly) great poets, but it was impossible to read either without a thorough warning of their antisemitism – the Italian seemed to think this was a safety requirement. He had no faith in any reader simply reading a text, whilst disingenuously claiming to believe that anything worthwhile would always survive on its own merits. If someone genuinely feels this, then why the need for all the Health and Safety proclamations? It’s the pathetic unwillingness to be honest I most despise – why not just say “I want Eliot to neither be read nor survive”?
Pure funk – he’d be afraid someone would accuse him of being a philistine, as Eliot’s status is near-unassailable. I say “near”, since these people are – though they’d never admit to it – really working on that. So, just be honest about it!
Needless to say, discussion then moved on to the Rhodes statue at nearby Oriel College, which both DPhils were adamant had to be removed. It was easily as disturbing to “victims of British imperialism” as any supposed hurt caused by Gaza protest chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” to Oxford’s Jewish students. Anyway, the English chap maintained, Jewish students (of which he wasn’t one) mostly approved of the protests, since only two had signed a petition in Balliol approving Israel’s actions.
“I wonder how those brave souls felt?” I asked. “I thought minorities were the key to all this?”
The Englishman – in fact, a pseudo-European intellectual – lovingly informed me that he could sniff out a fascist, and only one course of action could then follow.
Some stirring words from Lorca on the Spanish Civil War were recited.
I should have quoted Nietzsche – but presumably he’s problematic and a fascist?
He who fights with monsters best take care lest he himself becomes the monster.
Paul Sutton can be found on Substack. His new book on woke issues The Poetry of Gin and Tea is out now.
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Stop please world, I’m desperate to get off..
My wife just said the exact same thing about Banks cancelling accounts.
What a complete load of nonsense. How can anyone possibly break the Law by refusing to pay for something? My Dad wanted to get me a horse when I was a kid but my Mom said no: was that child abuse? Where does this crap end? Little Johnny is told he can’t have an ice cream, Little Johnny has been taught his Human Rights at school and sues his parents. Meanwhile, Janey has successfully sued for a 4 week holiday she needs for her mental health.
Janey and Johnny’s Maternal Person and Paternal Person have meanwhile been prosecuted by the CPS and have both lost their jobs.
All coming to a house near you.
Where does this end? It ends where enough people refuse to get on board with this claptrap. Until then, don’t expect the establishment, including the CPS, to do much that makes sense. How is anything like this going to play out anyway? Is anyone really going to be forced to make a settlement of thousands of quid on the strength of a court ruling that someone with money refused to fund the gender reassignment surgery of a family member (especially a spouse!)? I’ll believe it when I see a single successful case.
What about similar situations when one spouse is exhibiting symptoms such as compulsive self-immiseration, either as a behaviour pattern in its own right, or as part of more embracing mental health problem such as depression, borderine or bipolar mood disorder or similar self-harming behaviour? If one spouse refuses to agree to paying for some grossly excessive purchase, is that “coercive control” or “enforcing clear boundaries”? (Background: I became aware of a case in which some person, already diagnosed with bipolar, entered a manic phase in which she bought a racehorse for tens of thousands of pounds, without any interest in horses, and was appalled when she came out of the manic phase and realised what she had done, with no memory of the event, and then asked why nobody stopped her?)
My wife (well, she was last time I checked) just made a good point on this: if your wife changes to your husband he won’t be buying as many dresses.
I believe one should make strenuous efforts to stay married, within reason. I also think one should try to be supportive if you discover that your partner is mentally ill. But I think at some point if they can’t be convinced I’d be asking for a divorce.
Sort of makes the phrase ‘who wears the trousers round here?’ a little more pertinent…
I just can’t get my head around it. Someone I know quite well had a daughter who suffered from anorexia. It’s quite scary because it makes no sense but using logic doesn’t really work.
“I do. I wear the trousers – and I wash and iron them too”
I was thinking along the same lines. If someone has a true case of gender dysphoria it’s not something that would have occurred overnight but over many years, probably leading to considerable relational upheavals way before being asked to cough up to have ones parts removed. Or are people who broke up/separated/divorced under such circumstances now considered abuse criminals? And what happens if the mentally ill person decides that gender assignment didn’t work and wants to revert back to their original gender label – or even another one: does the same concept of ‘abuse’ apply? It’s the same illogical thinking that insists lesbians are transphobic if they won’t sleep with trans (wo)men with all their original parts. The mind truly boggles.
I know rationality is a waste of time in these matters, but it’s true that the issue boils down to the general claim that what you believe about yourself is, unchallengably, true:
So unless some reason can be presented why “gender”, including creative genders of your own invention, is exceptional, does this principle cover every other case of self-identification?
So gender dysphoria aside, we seem to be moving to a world where all delusions are indulged, whether harmful or not, or whether we treat them medically, spiritually, or just informally.
I suppose the liberal mind might wish to say that we make the exception where such beliefs about oneself are are harmful to others, when we must seek to change them. In that case, it’s an admission that “self knowledge” is, after all, merely an opinion subject to everyone else’s objective reality.
Or has anybody here ever heard any academic or activist argue the grounds upon which supposed “gender” (which seems to include being a cat now) is, alone, an objective truth? I thought not.
But objectivity no longer exists.
You can’t argue with a fact like that…
“the other fools are there to be exploited”, i.e. Dale Vince
If George Orwell was alive today, his head would be spinning round like a top with all the possible subjects to parody. In this, I only see more interference in what is essentially a private family matter. In any other age, no one would be able to sue other family members for withholding money or for telling their child they are what they were born as. Depending on the family, there would be different levels of how the message was conveyed. Once again, we see an opportunity to create division. Remember, the powers that be are hell-bent on societal collapse and that means undermining the traditional family because it represents the – or used to be – strongest unit within a community.
Anti family = Marxism
“I only see more interference in what is essentially a private family matter.”
The state has no business interfering in how a married couple spends their income.
I know one bloke who gives his wife an allowance every week and she is responsible for all their weekly shopping from this – he pays all the bills.
I know numerous couples who divvy up all bills on a 50-50 basis but any money they have left over is theirs.
I know couples who pool everything and every financial decision is shared.
If one partner decides to spend £50k on a car for example without the other’s consent does that constitute domestic abuse?
This is way out of order and perfectly confirms that the legal system has been taken over and corrupted.
Any clear thinking legal mind would reject this gratuitous, interfering nonsense out of hand.
My brain has short-circuited.
Up=Down
1=0
Your=My
Evil=Good
Insane=Sane
Injustice=Justice
And Right and Left no longer exist, in their place we have Centre.
If we’re going to play silly beggars, how about another, quite valid legal argument?
We are continually told that the victim group du jour have known since a young age (indeed, even in the womb!) that they are the wrong sex or fancy the same sex or species or whatever (it is getting very hard to keep up).
If I married a man who never gave me any indication that he felt he was a woman/a combo/a nothing/a double act (they) or that he fancied men, surely I would have a legal claim for fraud? I invested time, effort, finances into establishing a long term relationship with someone who obviously did not want the same things and hid this from me.
If I understand the CPS correctly, if I wished to have breast implants so I looked like Katie Price and my partner indicated he rather wished I wouldn’t as a) he preferred me not to look like a freak and b) he was genuinely concerned about my undergoing unnecessary medical procedures, as they always carry a risk, this would constitute domestic abuse? At the same time, if my husband were to suggest that I get implants so I looked like Katie Price, this too would constitute domestic abuse if I claimed that he was pressuring me?
Sophie Cook…
That explains it then….
Yep, it certainly does, who the feck do these people think they are..
And what on earth does he look like… Ffs
What a scorcher….oh…woof
A freak show in the clown world
What is guidance?
Is it a parallel legal system?
Somebody said to me the other day that we have the most right-wing government in recent years. I can see why he said it – there are strong words on controlling immigration, on curbing absurd wokeism, on making Brexit work, on pursuing unnattainable climate goals, curbing spending, etc, etc.
But in fact it’s the last 13 years of “Conservatism” that have seen all these these things grow from almost nothing to a true dystopia.
So it’s a right facing government, actually acting as a left-progressive government, either by saying one thing and doing another, or by setting up scapegoat ministers to fail at the hands of the Blob and an unsupportive executive.
What we have in Britain is as if Brezhnev’s government loudly extolled their commitment to capitalist enterprise, unilateral disarmament and Christianity in Pravda. They actually did trumpet their Soviet constitution’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion etc at the Russian Exhibition in London in 1968, much to my amusement, but our political rulers are exhibiting another level of hypocrisy altogether, and to their own voters rather than foreigners.
People of the right need to stop voting Conservative.
People of the Right are a shrinking minority. The majority of ‘Conservatives’ are fully signed up Statists, totally dependent on the State for everything.
Sadly you seem to be right, though I think there’s still a majority against mass immigration and that would get behind a sensible energy policy
The error is to assume Socialism is exclusive to Parties of Left.
Elevation of the State over the individual, destruction of property Rights, central economic planning and control can be adopted by all Parties.
Communism, Fascism and National Socialism shared these common roots, yet supposedly are polar opposites.
BwaHaHa – an aromatic aromantic! Pungently soul-less then?
Today were are getting Met Office Weather Warnings for a thunder clap and a passing shower.
If your spouse changes ‘gender’ you may well consider that they are not the person you married.
Some outcomes are worse than others. None are great,
So someone can identify as something they are not. ———Yep that’s fine by me except I might not choose to identify them as such. If a leopard wants to identify as a hyena must I accept that? Are we going down the rabbit hole of absurdity now? Yes we are. Soon a silly child who decides he is a fox will require to be put in a pigeon loft to rip the unfortunate birds to bits and it will be a crime not to allow it. ——This has now gone way beyond PC madness, or wokery now.
I’ll just dump this here. Absolutely sick to the back teeth of having women ignored, cancelled & treated with utter contempt.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12274419/Now-health-professionals-urged-call-vaginas-bonus-holes-avoid-offending-patients.html
If my husband decided he was a woman I’d be filing divorce that very day on the grounds that I’m not homosexual. Thankfully there’s zero chance of that happening.
I don’t think ‘grounds’ are required for divorce though it might help speed things up if one could agree them with the person who used to be the person one married.
People change. Some more than others
“Grounds for divorce” is an obsolete concept. One simple self-identifies as newly divorced and then gets the papers stamped at court. Five minutes. The onus is on the respondent to argue that the marriage has not irretrievably broken down, but the cost of a contested divorce is huge and the likelihood of success is minimal.
If my husband came home wanting to be ‘reassigned’ – I’d certainly help him on his way
- you get the picture……
Dysphoria includes, for example, blind people trapped in a sighted body. Where does a partner stand legally who refuses to stab their other half in the eyes to make them ‘whole’ and the person they ‘really are’?
It this transablephobia?
Surely thats the same as having an affair ! So would the court say you would need to help your partner with hotel shag bills , gifts ,sweet nothing phone bills etc ! Every day more bollocks ( if you’ll pardon the pun ) comes to light
Doesn’t look as if the CPS has improved much since Starmer’s incompetent and malign reign.
No doubt Max Hill also thinks that our schoolgirls should just lie back and think of “diversity” whilst being ravished by Labour supporting Pakistani taxi drivers and kebab shop owners. Whilst he denies any knowledge of what is happening, happy that “Jim” will fix it.
Seroius question: Why are you even with that person? Just leave. No law broken there.
Perhaps poor Serena Lau’s parents should pay for the damage to the Range Rover. CPS needs to be dismantled.
This whole state of affairs is “aromatic”, just not in a good way!
So if I had been happily married for five years and my wife decided she wanted £3000 out of our joint bank account to turn into a man, it is now a crime to put up an objection to that? Is is also abuse to then file for divorce, finding the prospect of being married to a man undesirable, on the grounds of discrimination?