by Giulio Meotti
The University of Exeter, one of the UK’s top 24 universities (and among the world’s top 100), has been warning undergraduates since January that they may “encounter uncomfortable views and content” in their studies of Homer.
Former prime minister Boris Johnson, who studied Greek and Latin, responded: “Is the University of Exeter saying their students are so weak-minded that they cannot appreciate Homer?” Yes, they are.
In September, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” – one of the most important books in the history of world literature that Harold Bloom considered “second only to Shakespeare” – was censored for its “expressions of Christian faith” at the University of Nottingham.
And Joyce’s masterpiece “Ulysses” was censored at the University of Glasgow (not Tehran), where Joyce’s 800-page account of an ordinary man’s day in Dublin was deemed offensive for its references to “race, gender and identity.”
The assault on Western culture and civilisation is proceeding apace and even the father of literature is now banned. Homer is being subjected to the usual incomprehensible criticisms, even though The Iliad remains the source of our civilisation and literary and cultural tradition.
And perhaps that is why he is under attack.
Just read “How the World Made the West” by Josephine Quinn, a leading professor of ancient history at Oxford, who wants to destroy everything that generations of scholars and university students have been taught to be proud of, namely Western values and achievements. Quinn tells us that there is no such thing as “Western civilisation”. The world made the West, not the other way around.
The capitulation of the cultural establishment to woke progressives appears complete.
First, students at the famous School of Oriental Studies at the University of London (SOAS) are asked to ban Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. These philosophers had a serious “fault”: they were white and also exponents of “colonialism”. Then Socrates and Aristotle are “racists and colonialists” according to the famous London university, which draws up a blacklist of Western thinkers to be replaced with Indian feminists and Nigerian “gender theorists.”
Now Cambridge University also teaches students that the Anglo-Saxons are a “myth” to be overcome in order to build an “anti-racist” civilization.
One of the goals of this ideology is to break Western supremacy by studying “invisible” peoples, led by Islam.
Greece was the first to pronounce the word “Europe”, and therefore to shape the idea of it. It is found in a poetic hymn, as old as Homer’s Iliad. By sponsoring his oracular temple at Delphi, Apollo informs us that they will all come to worship him, “from the Peloponnese, from Europe and from the islands battered by the wave.”
This is why this anti-Homeric obsession is ultimately a destructive will aimed towards Europe.
And if the woke nihilists seem to have little in common with the ayatollahs, they seem to share their obsession with Homer.
A warehouse of half a million books was discovered in a hangar in Tehran, including Homer’s “Iliad”. The Islamic Revolution did not like them, and confiscated them in 1979.
For those of you who are not yet convinced that the destruction of culture is seen as the key to imposing the dictatorship of political correctness, you can read “Humanism and Democratic Criticism” (2004) by the late American-Palestinian Arab intellectual Edward Said. He describes American universities before the 1980s: cradles of the cultural and literary tradition of the West, where Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Augustine and Dostoevsky were devoutly read.
Said recounts with satisfaction how in the space of twenty years this tradition was destroyed to create a new “humanism” and cites as a model the “regeneration” of Columbia, where he had become a professor. It was a gigantic emptying of heads to remake them from scratch.
And something else was put in those heads.
They are offended by the literary rapes in Ovid, but not by the real rapes of Hamas. First they erase Ovid, then they bring in Jihad. The French historian Georges Bensoussan is right, “Israel destabilizes the psyche of the West and Islam.”
Richard Seaford, professor emeritus of Classics at the University of Exeter who now censors Homer, has refused to write for Israeli academic journals. “Professor Seaford, I am the editor of Scripta Classica Israelica,” Daniela Dueck of Israel’s Bar Ilan University wrote to him. “We would like to include a review of the book in our volume… Would you be interested?” Seaford’s response: “I can’t accept because I joined the academic boycott of Israel.”
They censor Homer, boycott Israel, and justify Jihad. One of Exeter’s professors, Ilan Pappé, says he “admires” October 7.
We know the phrase attributed to Aristotle: “Apathy is the last virtue of a dying society.” We would do well to remember that.