The latest act of senseless Western civilisational suicide comes from Nottingham University in the allegedly Christian country of England. Here, as previously reported on this website, a module upon its undergraduate English Literature course, “Chaucer and his Contemporaries,” has gained a vital new trigger-warning for the 2024/25 academic year, alerting students that the books on its reading-list may contain “incidences of violence, mental illness and [by far the worst!] expressions of Christian faith.”
As Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is famously about mediaeval Christians going on a long pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, this latter news should come as no surprise to most sensible students, who surely won’t be given similar trigger-warnings making them aware that “this book may contain expressions of Islamic faith” prior to reading The 1,001 Nights. As critics pointed out, The Canterbury Tales also features quite a lot of explicit sexual content and swearing, none of which students were cautioned about prior to their lectures. It also features a fair amount of antisemitism too, but no doubt the left-wing professors responsible for the warning considered that more a selling-point than a sticking-point.
Other texts on Nottingham’s reading-list were also labelled suspect. The classic Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contained “Christian themes and beliefs”—woke-primed students were probably hoping it was all about environmental activism. Worse, the long narrative poem Piers Plowman, students have been warned, even goes so far as to recommend something called “Christian virtue”! Yet, for the course convenors, Christianity clearly contains precisely no virtues at all, so has to be expressly warned against.
As a University spokesman explained, the English Department’s trigger-warning “does not assume that all our students come from a Christian background,” a euphemistic admission that, given Britain’s shifting demographics, many of them these days will be Muslims: according to the 2021 census, around 12% of the city’s population is Islamic. If the Sheriff of Nottingham is increasingly now being substituted with the Sharif of Nottingham, then the traditional culture of the inhabitants must be systematically diluted and ‘problematised’ in this fashion, in a probable prelude to being replaced.
As the French prophet of demographic doom Renaud Camus has accurately warned, in order for a Great Replacement successfully to occur, an initial prior Great Deculturation must first take place, thereby manufacturing consent for this process amongst an ignorant and deracinated populace who no longer see anything in their own ancestral heritage worth defending.
The Battle of the Books
The Chief Executive of UK pressure group Christian Concern, Andrea Williams, responded to Nottingham University’s actions as follows:
The Bible is foundational to understanding the history of English literature. Without an understanding of the Christian faith there will be no way for students to access the world of Chaucer and his contemporaries … It’s ludicrous to issue such trigger warnings. From what point in history are we going to censor literary texts, given most [historical ones] are steeped in [a] Christian worldview? … To censor expressions of the Christian faith is to lose our literary heritage.
Williams is correct, but perhaps she fails to see that causing the young people of the West to “lose our literary heritage” is the whole point. Curricula in many contemporary English Literature courses on either side of the Atlantic appears increasingly designed to put people off reading what we once called ‘the classics’ by filling students’ heads with the idea that such books are nothing but worthless filth packed with racism, colonialism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and all the rest. And, by deliberately murdering Great Books in this way, today’s left-wing cultural gatekeepers thereby act ultimately to murder the Good Book too—namely, the Bible.
Everywhere we look, the West is killing its own fathers and grandfathers: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Nelson, Washington, and Churchill all are now revealed as having been worthless bigots. This strikes me as nothing so much as a form of purest civilisational euthanasia.
The story about Nottingham University broke at the same time as news about the UK’s new left-wing Labour Party Government making moves to ensure a parliamentary vote takes place on the issue of medically assisted dying. This measure is intended only to speed up the demise of the terminally ill, but one fear is that it will allow people to put pressure on their ‘burdensome’ aged relations to hurry up and die so they can squander the family inheritance as they see fit.
It strikes me that this is comparable to what professors like those at Nottingham University are seeking to do: to force the old West into hurrying up and dying, so the civilisational slate can be wiped wholly clean to Year Zero and an entirely new society then be built on its deliberately forgotten rubble. The chief long-lingering hospitalised patient in need of being put out of its misery, of course, is Christianity. In killing Christianity, we are truly killing our civilisation’s father; euthanising The Canterbury Tales is just one expression of this process.
Annihilation Nation
I thought of these issues recently whilst writing a review of the celebrated French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Annihilation. The book is about the Annihilation of old Catholic France in a worn-out 21st century secular West being rapidly invaded by Islam, and the personal Annihilation of one of the main characters, Paul, who effectively chooses suicide by refusing treatment for his cancer.
Having no will to live, France and the character Paul alike select death for themselves. Houellebecq’s wider oeuvre as a whole tries to demonstrate how all this has come about due to the slow, lingering after-effects of the nation losing its historic Catholic faith. This loss has left the French people with no obvious reason to go on living beyond short-term pleasures of personal satisfaction like sex and consumer gratification. For this, Houellebecq has sometimes been labelled as a secret ‘crypto-Catholic,’ but this is not so. For many years an atheist, he is today an agnostic, but one who can still clearly see that, by abandoning Christianity, the West has chosen a path towards euthanizing itself—a path our politicians foolishly and blindly mislabel as ‘progress.’
In his books, Houellebecq demonstrates clearly how this sad process occurred, demonstrating how free-market forces and the (ironically compulsory) idea of consumer choice in the modern, post-WWII world have divided Westerners from one another, thereby preventing them from so much as wishing to reproduce themselves.
As the post-war French countryside emptied itself through mass urbanisation, Houellebecq explains in his 1998 breakthrough novel Atomised, “the possible opportunities for a future spouse became almost infinite, just as the [free-market concept of consumer-] choice itself became of the utmost importance.” This especially became the case once equally free and easy access to cheap contraception appeared on the open market. Once people took advantage of these new, consumerism-modelled sexual opportunities, divorce-rates soared and the nuclear family promptly imploded.
Houellebecq himself came from a broken home, raised by his Communist grandmother after his feckless hippie mum had swanned off to Brazil with her latest toyboy. In Atomised, he provided a fictionalised portrait of her general inadequacy, culminating with her imaginary equivalent dying, wholly unlamented, whilst her son sits by her sickbed impatiently playing Tetris until Game Over. Once he had become famous, the author’s real mother then published an egotistical 400-page roman à clef trying unsuccessfully to justify her previous actions, before embarking on a book-tour in which, to drum up further custom, she called her child “a sorry little pr*ck.”
The cycle of emotional familial deprivation then inevitably continued, with Houellebecq becoming remote from his own son. Asked in an interview whether he loved him, Houellebecq Sr replied “I suppose so,” but added that instead of having any more kids “I’d rather have a dog, they’re easier to satisfy.”
Merci Killing
I suppose what Houellebecq really means here is that, if you just have a dog as a ‘pet-child’ substitute for a human one, it will be easier to satisfy your own personal desires in life, rather than having to make any meaningful sacrifices for the next generation. And yet, ultimately, if this kind of attitude spreads too far across society and becomes the norm, then the simple laws of demographics mean your parent society becomes doomed in the long run. Already, falling native French birth-rates leave politicians importing young workers from other cultures en masse to fill jobs, ironically often as care-workers and nurses looking after the (frequently childless) elderly. The end result is that the nation is already around 10% Muslim, which may even become a majority a century from now.
Is this not also a kind of euthanasia? Yes, but it is simultaneously something much worse: the self-centred murder of others around you who do not necessarily themselves also want to die.
Houellebecq still retains enough of his old ancestral morality to be a public opponent of euthanasia, and makes one of his characters, Cecile, into a Catholic who chides her brother Paul when she realises he has refused cancer treatment: “You might imagine that your life belongs to you but that’s wrong. Your life belongs to the people who love you … you belong to other people, even if you don’t know it.” But, it seems many people of a left-wing bent these days don’t know it, and so are forcing shared collective civilisational suicide upon their peers, who actually wish both themselves and their wider historic way of culture to go on existing.
In Houellebecq’s pessimistic view, even France’s priests will probably ultimately knuckle down and go along with the future introduction of easy legalised medical euthanasia into society:
[Catholics will do their best to resist, but, sad to say, we have more or less got used to the idea that the Catholics always lose … I do not have a lot of illusions … faiths will end up by giving way and submitting to the yoke of ‘Republican law.’ Their priests, rabbis, or imams will in future visit euthanasia candidates to tell them that yes, it is an ugly business, but tomorrow will be better, and that even if people have abandoned them, God will take care of them. Let us be honest about that.
In an essay about Vincent Lambert, a semi-comatose Frenchman euthanised in 2019 following a road-accident, Houellebecq quoted G.K. Chesterton’s (reputed) old assessment of Sparta, where the frail and disabled were left exposed to the elements alone to die, to the effect that this now extinct nation prided itself on efficiency, “and, for this reason, disappeared without a trace.” As Houellebecq says: “Our society, too, likes to boast of its efficiency; it will disappear, like Sparta, and maybe all that will remain is the uncertain memory of a shame, the shadow of a certain disgust.”
That “certain disgust” today is for Christianity, the aged, hospital-bed-ridden parent of us all, as demonstrated conclusively by the recent treatment of Geoffrey Chaucer and his dangerous and upsetting references to “Christian faith.” Here is a good, far more honest, trigger-warning which Nottingham University should put on their English Literature course for their students to read instead: “Your professors want to groom you to murder your own parents.”
Will we really just lie back quietly and let such Doctors of Death go on handing out the civilisational morphine? For when some patients don’t actually want to receive it, that isn’t ‘assisted dying’ at all: it’s murder.
