Frank Furedi on the Woke Cancellation of Chaucer, Newton and Other Key Figures for Racism and Colonialism

A few days ago, Frank Furedi published a piece about ‘woke’ academic attacks on key figures of the British literary and scientific canon because someone in a series of universities, schools and museums had decided that they were racist and colonialist. This included Chaucer, who was denounced as a rapist, racist and colonialist, Shakespeare, and Milton. Milton was an opponent of slavery, but he didn’t escape censure because he believed Whites were more beautiful than Blacks. Newton came in for it, because despite discovering gravity and revolutionising physics, he ‘may have benefited from colonialism.’ Sydney Opera House apologised for classical music. It was racist, because traditionally White culture views it as the highest musical form. Then there was the case of the Cambridge Archaeological, Museum, which staged a display of Greek statues drawing attention to their ‘whiteness’. The classics department at the same university also the role the classics have played in the development of racism. The article also described how one American high school English teacher boasted online about getting the Odyssey banned from the school library. At the same time, the science departments at British universities are under pressure to decolonise their curricula, because science was a tool the British Empire used to exploit and oppress its subject peoples. This is all being pushed by the Quality Assurance Agency, which also wanted Maths students to be told that some of the statistical techniques had been pioneered by eugenicists. It demanded instead that its teaching should also promote diversity. Furedi rightly considered this an attack on key figures in western culture motivated by the contemporary anti-racism craze.

I’m not a fan of Furedi. I think he started out as one of the Living Marxism crew, before joining the Libertarian hard right with the rest of them after the fall of Communism. But he’s right here. He writes that the ‘decolonisation project of British universities has no interest in academic learning. Its objective is to discredit and take down the leading historical figures in the sciences and humanities. When I say take down, I mean literally take down. In an attempt to emulate the Rhodes Must Fall campaign targeting the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, students at Cape Town University adopted the phrase ‘science must fall’! It appears that discrediting science is a small price to pay for decolonising some of the most precious achievements of humanity.’

And concludes

‘The campaign designed to discredit and de-authorise the humanities should concern us all, for what is at stake is the status of a cultural legacy that has endured for thousands of years and inspired people throughout the ages. If we lose sight of the artistic, literary and intellectual contribution of Ancient Greece and Rome, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we risk falling under the spell of cultural illiteracy. We owe a great debt to the humanities, for they provided the foundation for developing human civilisation’s moral and scientific insights.

The assault on knowledge threatens to corrode and discredit the intellectual foundation of our civilisation. Orwell’s prediction that by 2050 Newspeak will triumph no longer seems farfetched. Every time an academic subject or a field of intellectual or artistic endeavour becomes decolonised, we risk losing sight of what we have lost. As I noted elsewhere, society is coming under the spell of historical amnesia. That is why we must raise the alarm and take action to protect our arts and sciences from the cultural vandals stalking our institutions.’

It’s not hard to find rebuttals against these cancellations. Past people had very different cultural values, and it is wrong to expect them to share those of ‘woke’ 21st century militant anti-racists. But their attitudes towards race and colonialism does not invalidate their work, any more than any other aspect of their personal lives. Isaac Newton is a case in point. He was an extremely difficult, bigoted, quarrelsome individual. He deliberately lectured in Latin so that as few people as possible could understand his theories, and had a venomous hatred of Roman Catholicism. His descriptions of what he hoped would happen to Catholic nuns apparently is very misogynistic. He also had a long-running feud with the German scientist and philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, over who invented calculus first. During the feud, they both reviewed each others’ books under pseudonyms, along with other underhand tactics. But this doesn’t invalidate Newton as one of the key figures in the history of western science.

As for Milton, many peoples across the world believe that their own race is the most beautiful of all. This includes Black peoples, who regarded Whites as ugly, as described by anthropologists. But Milton’s Paradise Lost is a classic of British, and indeed world literature. As is another of his works, the Areopagita, which is one of the first pleas for freedom of speech. I think the various people and institutions intent on censoring and controlling what we say for ideological reasons should be forced to read it, along with Mill’s On Liberty, until they can recite in their sleep.

Moving on to the ‘whiteness’ of Greek statuary, it’s been known for a long time that in their heyday they were painted in bright colours. They only appear white because the paint has worn off over the millennia. And you can find white statues from earlier cultures in the Middle East going back to the Sumerians.

All these attacks ultimately come from the Critical Social Justice conception of ‘Whiteness’. White culture is innately racist and oppresses people of colour. Anti-racists should therefore insist on its decolonisation in order to create a more inclusive and diverse culture.

But in these attacks on key western figures and culture, it has moved beyond simply recognising the value of other peoples and their discoveries into an attack on White culture itself.

Claire Fox Speech in Parliament Against Housing Predatory Trans Identified Men in Women’s Prisons

Heaven help us, I can’t believe I’m actually agreeing with something Claire Fox has done. Fox is a thoroughly loathsome piece of work. She was in one of the Communist sects led by Frank Furedi, which published Living Marxism. As a genuine, paid-up member of the far left, she and the rest of the LM crew were fully behind the IRA’s right to armed struggle and their consequent bombing and murder of civilians. This continued right up to either the Omagh or Warrington bombing in the 1990s, which did much to discredit the IRA. Among the victims of the Warrington bomb were two small boys. While supporters of terrorism would naturally consider soldiers and politicians fair targets, I think severely normal people, British, Irish or whatever, hate the murder of innocent civilians and positively loathe that of children. The bombings were widely condemned, except by Fox, who defended it. She has never retracted or apologised for her comments.

Then, when Communism fell, she and the rest of the Living Marxism crew decided to abandon it as well. They crossed the floor to become right-wing Libertarian Tory contrarians. Living Marxism was rebranded as the Last Magazine, ’cause the Fall of Communism marked the end of history according to Francis Fukuyama. This went down the tubes, but Furedi and the rest went on to found Spiked. Which, as Zelo Street has so wittily put it, is so called because it should be. The other year the ghastly Fox was then taken up by the Tories for her work on their behalf, and is now a peer in the House of Lords. Ugh!

But this time she has done something right. One of the issues facing gender-critical feminists and anyone concerned with women’s safety is the move to house transwomen in women’s prisons. Unfortunately, this does not just mean the kind of people most us would naturally think of as a transwoman. I think most people, when they think of them have in mind gentle souls, whose identification with born women has led them to transition surgically. If this was the case, and all transwomen were like that, then I think there would be much less opposition to transwomen being placed in women’s prisons.

Sadly this is not the case. The trans category has been expanded so that it includes biological men, who identify as women but retain their male anatomy. Furthermore, the traditional rigorous medical examinations to confirm trans status have been, or are planning to be, scrapped in place of self-recognition. A male prisoner may therefore claim to be a really a woman only on his own say-so, and therefore demand to be placed in a women’s prison. This is a real problem for the safety of the women already there, as many of them are violent rapists and sex offenders. There has already been a series of rapes and sexual assaults in California’s women’s prisons, thanks to the legislation demanding that trans identified men be housed in them, to the point where the prison authorities are actually handing out condoms.

I realise this is a controversial issue, and people have been cancelled and thrown off university campuses for stating that there are only two sexes and other challenges to the trans ideology. I will state again that I am not anti-trans, and do not wish to see anyone persecuted, beaten, discriminated against or denied educational or employment opportunities because of their sexuality or gender identification. But I do believe there is an imperative need to keep women safe from dangerous predators.

I’ve blogged about this issue before. Gillyflowerblog, one of the respected commenters on this blog, has said in a previous comment about a post I made on Sargon of Gasbag and Posy Parker on the dangers of radical trans extremists on the dangers of involving the medical profession. She said: “Lastly, if a medical certificate is required to transition then do you expect the same for gay people. After all, the biology suggests heterosexuality. It is a very dangerous step to invole the medical profession”. I take her point. I’ve no doubt it is, and have every sympathy in this regard as once upon a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence people did seek medical intervention to correct it. However, while I recognise the dangers of medical intervention, you can do much to help women’s safety by removing biologically male rapists and predators from them. I understand the British government is doing so by building separate trans wings for them.

Belfield, the mad right-wing internet radio host, put up this video of Fox making her speech on his blog yesterday, with a comment about how loved her. Well, he would, as he’s as right-wing as she is. Nevertheless, Fox makes very good points, though this doesn’t alter the fact that she and her fellow Spiked crowd are still scumbags.

Brendan O’Neill Claims El Paso Mass Murderer ‘Eco-Terrorist’

Is there no lie so low that Brendan O’Neill and Spiked won’t stoop to? Spiked magazine, as has been pointed out by various left-wing blogs, is completely unrelated to the satirical magazine of the same name that briefly appeared in the 1990s. That was an attempt to compete with Private Eye, but rather more left-wing and much more scatological. It had a cartoon strip spoofing Clinton with the title ‘Clinton’s Got Aides’, for example, which was presumably a pun about both the presidential staffers and the disease. The modern Spiked is frantically right-wing. It’s what happened to the net work around Living Marxism magazine after Communism collapsed. Instead of carrying on the ideological struggle for equality and workers’ rights, the former Revolutionary Communists decided to throw on in their lot with capitalism and became extremely right-wing. And one of their latest pieces of drivel is very unpleasant indeed.

On Thursday, the Sage of Crewe put up on Zelo Street a piece taking apart an article by Brendan O’Neill, one of Spiked’s hacks, who decided to vent his spleen and try to smear the left with the El Paso massacre last weekend. You’d have thought this would be difficult, as the murderer was a White supremacist with a bitter hatred of immigrants. Like the White terrorist a few months ago who shot up the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, because they were Jews, who were heavily involved with a charity for immigrants. But no, for O’Neill it was because the mass-murderer was an ‘eco-terrorist’. O’Neill’s piece began

“In his alleged manifesto, the killer, alongside his racist rants about Hispanic people and the ‘replacement’ of whites, attacks modern society for being eco-unfriendly. Westerners’ lifestyles are ‘destroying the environment’ and ‘creating a massive burden for future generations’, he says. He seems obsessed with the core element of green thinking.

He then went on to state that the murderer in his manifesto was also strongly opposed to urban sprawl, consumer culture for producing thousands of tonnes of plastic and electronic waste, and humanity’s decimation of the environment. He also alleged that the murderer targeted a Wal-Mart as an act of ‘eco-Malthusianism’. O’Neill speculated that he not only wanted to kill Latinos, but also shoppers. He also claimed that the butcher, who opened fire on the worshippers at the mosque in Christchurch said that he was an ‘eco-Fascist’ not a Nazi. The Zelo Street article effectively tears O’Neill’s nonsense to shreds, quoting a comment by Zubaida Haque:

“Brendan O’Neill’s piece is utterly dishonest. I’ve seen the manifesto thru a journalist. It’s almost entirely focused on immigrants and barely mentions environmentalists. And there’s a whole section on guns, how it’s great that US have them and how the killer needed to adapt his”.

Zelo Street notes that, strangely, O’Neill’s article doesn’t mention that. He also skewers the article’s attempts to appear mildly even-handed by throwing in a few ‘perhaps’ and ‘it seems’ when the title of the wretched article asserts that ‘El Paso was a vile act of eco-terrorism’. He concludes that O’Neill is a massive charlatan, ‘so no change there then’.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/08/brendan-o-neill-out-trolls-himself.html

There are several points of interest about the article, and how it tries to divert attention from the attacker’s real motives. One is O’Neill’s careful avoidance of informing his readers that the El Paso terrorist was a gun nut. The Republican party gets a considerable amount of funding from the NRA, whose leadership get donations from the gun and munitions companies. Most Americans, including the rank and file members of the NRA, would actually like tougher legislation on certain types firearms to prevent atrocities like this occurring. Or at least, preventing the killers from having access to military-grade weaponry. But because of the power of corporate sponsorship, this is ignored in favour of the fanatics, who believe that every American should have the right to own the type of guns and armaments wielded by professional soldiers. In the name of freedom, of course.

The argument here is that a free people need guns in order to defend themselves from an oppressive regime. The Holocaust is often cited as an example. If the Jews had guns, it’s argued, they could have successfully fought off the Nazis. This ignores the fact that the legislation permitting and demanding their persecution was gradually enacted, so that it is difficult to tell when German and eastern European Jews could have rebelled before it was too late. Furthermore, while the Jews were disarmed, the Nazis were also very firmly in favour of ‘Aryan’ Germans owning firearms. And in many cases, Jews did not go passively to the gas chambers, but rose in heroic revolt. But this didn’t help them, because they were pitched against the massively superior force of the German armed forces. No matter how incredibly bravely they fought, it was inevitable that, with the exception of the Russian Jews, who banded together in that country’s forests, they’d lose.

Guns don’t guarantee freedom. And the availability of military-grade weapons to the public just makes atrocities like El Paso possible, regardless of the views of doubtless responsible weapons hobbyists.

There’s also the attempt in O’Neill’s article to smear Green politics with the taint of Fascism. The Republicans in America have been doing that for a very long time. I remember coming across this type of argument in the 1980s. This argues that because the Nazis were very ecologically aware, environmentalism itself is somehow automatically Fascist. This obviously ignores the central features of Fascism – dictatorship, extreme nationalism, racism and militarism. It also ignores the fact that the roots of the modern Green movement lies in the increasing appreciation of the threatened beauty of the natural world from the 19th century onward by thinkers and social movements that had nothing to do with Nazism or organised anti-Semitism. One source of the American Conservationist movement, for example, is working class huntsmen. The same people the American Right tends to celebrate and defend. In fact much of the early Conservationist movement in both America and Britain came from the first few generations of factory workers, who yearned for the beauty of the countryside their parents and grandparents had left in search of work. At the same time, local authorities and the wider public in Britain became concerned about the threat to the countryside from urban sprawl and the dangers to health from industrial pollution, lack of sanitation and overcrowding. One early example of this new sensibility in art is Cruikshank’s 1829 cartoon, London Going Out of Town, which shows the capital, represented by decaying buildings, and personified by marching, anthropomorphic buckets and spades, invading a terrified, equally anthropomorphised countryside.

O’Neill’s piece also shows how desperate the Anglo-American Right are to divert attention from the role of nationalism in the rising racism and the resulting atrocities. Remember how Candace Owens, when she appeared over here to promote Turning Point UK, tried to distance nationalism from the Nazis? She notoriously claimed that, in her opinion, Hitler wasn’t a nationalist. He was the opposite of a nationalist, she claimed, because he didn’t want what was right for his own country. He imposed it on others. She was rightly torn to shreds for this piece of utter bunkum by people, who pointed out that her wretched comment seemed to suggest that it would have been all right for Hitler to exterminate the Jews, if he had just kept to those in Germany. They also pointed out that Hitler actively said that he was a nationalist. It was in his party’s name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Conservatives, not just in America, like to claim that he was a socialist on the basis of the party’s name, despite the fact that the Nazis weren’t and were actively hostile to it, whatever they said to the contrary. But they really don’t want to face the fact that he also rightly claimed to be a nationalist.

O’Neill’s article is thus absolute rubbish, designed to protect nationalism and the gun lobby by throwing the blame instead on the Green movement. It’s an example of Spiked’s absolute mendacity, and is pretty much in line with the Right’s hatred of environmentalism and its increasing concern to defend racism and extreme nationalism. And unfortunately, as governments in America and Britain move rightward, I fear we can expect more of this dangerous nonsense.

Private Eye on Brexit Party’s Claire Fox’s Support for Murderous Fascists

The furore over UKIP’s lurch to the far right and Batten’s recruitment of such controversial, deeply bigoted YouTube personalities and activists like Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Paul Joseph Watson and Tommy Robinson has somewhat obscured the issue of just how politically extreme Nigel Farage’s new Brexit party is. The Brexit party seem to be eating UKIP alive at the polls, but although it’s somewhat more moderate than UKIP, Farage himself was credibly accused of racism and Fascist sympathies when he was in charge of the party. He also wants to privatise the NHS and carry on the other Tory policies of destroying the welfare state and impoverishing its working people. All for the benefit of the extremely rich, like himself. And when he was in charge of UKIP, it also was full of racists, anti-feminists, those, who bitterly hated gays and Muslims. And his Brexit party also contains its fair share of very offensive characters.

One of these is Claire Fox, formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who, like the rest of her comrades, ditched Marxism and moved to the libertarian extreme right. Zelo Street have published a series of pieces refuting her claims to have joined the Brexit Party from the Left, and revealing her disgusting comments supporting IRA terrorism at the time of the Warrington bombing. Fox, then in the RCP, wrote a piece justifying the atrocity, declaring that Irish nationalists had the right to use all and every means necessary to achieve freedom for Ulster. Which meant the right to kill innocent men, women and children. When she was asked about these remarks a few days ago, rather than disavow them she doubled down and confirmed her support. And she isn’t alone in supporting Irish Republican terrorism either. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, one of the Brexit party’s candidates in London, was also a member of the RCP, which as a whole supported Irish nationalist terrorism.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/05/nigel-farages-terrorist-sympathisers.html

Private Eye has also published a piece about Fox’s offensive views in its current issue for 3 – 16 May, 2019, ‘Outfoxing Nigel’, on page 10. It’s written by ‘Ratbiter’, otherwise known as the Absurder journo Nick Cohen, who has taken time off from ranting about how Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. His accusations there are rubbish, and some of his claims are seriously skewed. But in this instance he may well be right. The article runs

“I’ve been a left-wing campaigner for 35 years,” Claire Fox wrote in the Daily Mail after posing alongside Nigel Farage to announce her candidacy for the Brexit Party. “You’d struggle to find a pair of more unlikely political bedfellows.”

Apart from Brexit, is there anything the “left-wing” Fox and the right-wing Farage have in common? Just about everything, as it turns out.

Fox’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was one of the weirdest sects on the far left. Its leading cadres – Frank Furedi, Mick Hume, Brendan O’Neill and Fox herself – decided in 1997 that there was no future in Leninism, since “the working class has no political existence”, and tried their luck with the media class instead.

The RCP’s successor organisations, the Institute of ideas and Spiked magazine, exploited the limitless appetite of the BBC and Tory press for “contrarian” opinions. Such was their success in thinking the unthinkable and saying the unspeakable they drew a $300,000 donation from the billionaire Koch borthers, who fund dozens of right-wing causes.

Farage could not fail to be impressed. He and his former Ukip colleagues opposed attempts by the EU to improve ‘elf and safety, and the rebranded RCP had little time for public safety either. Fox denounced the mollycoddling of the “anti-bullying industry”, arguing that teachers who tried to protect children were sapping their “resilience”.

Famously, Farage doesn’t much like East Europeans. At times, it seems as if the only East Europeans he can stand are dictators: Viktor Orban may have censored the media, packed the judiciary and presided over epic corruption, but to Farage he is a “defender of Hungarian culture” against the EU.

Although Fox told the Mail she disagreed with Farage’s demands for immigration conrols, she and her old RCP comrades have had no problems with the most brutal controls imaginable in on Europeans who stay in their own countries. When Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic organised rape and death squads in the 1990s to “cleanse” Bosnia’s Muslims, they had no more loyal defenders than the RCP’s magazine Living Marxism.

After Penny Marshall of ITN and Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian revealed the appalling conditions in Serb prison camps at Omarska and Trnopolje, Living Marxism declared that the journalists had faked the pictures. Fox and friends and offered no defence of their story when ITN sued for libel. They did not recant when survivors gave testimony in the Hague or when mass graves were found near Omarska. Last year the journalists who run London’s Frontline Club considered inviting Fox to speak. Vulliamy insisted she apologise to the camp victims first, but Fox refused to back away from the modern equivalent of Holocaust denial. Naturally, the BBC thinks she is the ideal person to have as a regular panelist on the Moral Maze.

To be fair to Farage, he has never endorsed bullying children, indeed he broke down when describing how his own children had been bullied. He may have won the Brexit referendum by demonising East European immigrants but he has never covered up their murder. And although he endorses Orban, he has yet to act as a propagandist for Balkan strongmen who have been convicted of crimes against humanity.

The question is now how Fox can bear to be in same party as Farage, but how Farage can bear to in the same party as her.

Francis Wheen on RCP Violence

I’m not surprised the LM/Spiked crowd support bullying children. Francis Wheen in his book on paranoia in the 1970s, Strange Days, describes how the international training camps the Revolutionary Communist Party ran were rife with violence. One girl was raped in one, and a young Black American stabbed to death in another. But the Party’s leader refused to do anything about it, and indeed approved of the violence, because he felt it would toughen the working class up for revolution.

Fox and Ulster Terrorism

As for Fox’s support for IRA terrorism, I’m also disgusted, but not surprised. I think there were quite a few on the extreme left like her. But the murder of innocent civilians is utterly disgusting no matter who does it, whether it’s the IRA, Ulster Loyalists or the British state. And it’s an insult not just to the victims of terror, including the mothers who reached across the aisle in Ulster to demand an end to the violence. I’ve also met plenty of Roman Catholic Northern Irishmen, who would like a united Ireland, but thoroughly reject sectarianism and violence.

Serb Atrocities in Bosia

I’ve also come across allegations that some of the stories about Serb atrocities in the war in Bosnia were falsified by the media and British state in order to provide a pretext for keeping British and other NATO troops stationed in the Balkans. However, the carnage inflicted on the Bosnian people was quite real. Way back in the 1990s Mike spent a week as a guest of a Bosnian Muslim family in a visit arranged by a human rights organisation to show the destruction caused by the war in the Muslim region. Mike enjoyed his stay and his hosts were great people. But the damage caused by the Serb assault was everywhere. Although the war was over by that time, conditions were still very dangerous as the retreating Serbs had left booby traps.

I also used to do voluntary work with a former member of the British armed forces and the British diplomatic team sent to negotiate an end to the war. He told me that, although all the parties in the war, Croats and Muslims as well as Serbs, committed atrocities, on the whole most of them were committed by the Serbs. I’ve also spoken to British army officers, who were sent into Bosnia as part of the peacekeeping forces, and they described some of the atrocities that the Serb forces committed.

Zelo Street in their article on Fox’s disgusting views quoted Times hack Otto English, who wondered how James Glancy, another Brexit candidate in the Euro elections and former member of the SBS felt about Fox celebrating the murder of his comrades. Or Ann Widdecombe about rubbing shoulders with the people, who supported the Brighton Bombing that killed and maimed so many of the Tory party.

Farage’s Brexit Party is far Right, and so should be kept out of power. They aren’t quite a revolting as Claire Fox, whose disgusting views mean that she should be kept out of any party that’s trying for electoral respectability, and definitely not be given a platform on radio or TV to broadcast them.

More from Neurasthenia Milkshake on Ben Goldacre, ME, and Bad Science

Following my posting of their comments about ME, I got this appreciative comment from Neurasthenia Milkshake, discussing the problems at Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science website, and adding further information on the controversial nature of the findings of the Oxford scientists that, somehow, ME or chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is all ‘in the mind’. Here it is.

Why, thank you for this–what a pleasant surprise to find. This is a big story, though it never has been ,and, fortunately, it only seems to be growing. We may be coming at it from slightly different angles, but I believe firmly that there is an enormous story even beyond PACE, and if all the pieces are put together the right way by good people, it amounts to a medical scandal the likes of which I’m fairly sure nobody has ever seen. But that’s speculation, for another day, hopefully.

A last word on Ben Goldacre–this is a professional who has indeed spent a lot of his time working to expose poor science. It seems therefore a bit curious that he has never really said much about ME, or PACE, or related topics. I suppose it’s to his credit that he never lauded PACE, though it was vigorously defended on his forum.

(The backstory behind why that forum is no longer attached to his website is ugly and most definitely ME/CFS related, but with the relevant info no longer available, not provable. Let’s just say some commenters got out of hand, though in a most vicious manner ,and if I were Goldacre there would have been a time when I would have been concerned with legal action–but the ‘evidence’ has conveniently been lost. I can elaborate further, but only if requested, and specifically with the proviso that I can only describe what I know and saw, but not prove it, and Goldacre himself would almost certainly not have tolerated it, had he been aware, which I would guess he wasn’t.)

One might ask, then, why didn’t he speak up one way or another? Going on the assumption that he is indeed a crusader, I would suggest that he has connections, if not specifically to the PACE researchers (which is actually quite possible), then to their colleagues. It’s more than possible that he was not comfortable speaking up against these people. I’m sure this is not unique to this particular environment, but I have certainly heard tales of treatment of colleagues who do not share their views, and that’s not a pleasant matter, either. It’s especially frustrating, because one would hope that medical science would be devoid of such environments, all the more so when people are suffering horribly, and are treated poorly based on admittedly flawed perceptions of publications like PACE (i.e. that ME is psychological, in spite of the protests of the PACE team that this may not be so).

I apologize again for offering opinion when I would prefer to offer facts. There is a possibility Goldacre has been somewhat negligent if he spotted the flaws identified by Tuller and Coyne–but a large number of other researchers, physicians, and, importantly, journalists, never have, either. Do I point a finger at the PACE team? Yes. I point a finger at Sir SImon Wessely as well, although, with his formidable eloquence, he typically sidesteps efforts to paint him as a malevolent, all-powerful puppet master.

He is affiliated with the Science Media Centre, however. And the history of some of those folks–Revolutionary Communist Party, Living Marxism, Spiked…is something I expect someone will take a good, long look at. Someday.

Last word: you know about the DT–and you’ll know about some of the following from Tuller’s blogs.

Naturally, the NHS is still promoting CBT and GET for ME:

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/10October/Pages/Exercise-and-therapy-useful-for-chronic-fatigue-syndrome.aspx

In the US, so is the CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/cfs/management/quality-of-life.html

http://www.cdc.gov/cfs/management/managing-activities.html

Although earlier this year the US Institute of Medicine issued a report saying the disease is definable by the relapse caused by exertion…

http://iom.nationalacademies.org/Reports/2015/ME-CFS.aspx

While in Norway, reseachers are actually publishing studies showing success with a chemotherapeutic agent, Rituximab (not that they or anyone else find it easy to secure funding):

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27813-antibody-wipeout-found-to-relieve-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/

So: CBT and GET…or…a cancer/RA drug?

How is this even possible?

I find it extremely encouraging that the Norwegians should be reporting success with drug therapy. It shows the flaws in our corporatist-controlled model of the disease very clearly.

I’m not particularly interested in the specifics of the furore at Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science website. These internet fights and controversies are quite common, and have affected no end of web sites. Given the controversial nature of what went on, and that Neurasthenia Milkshake says they can only describe what they saw, but not prove, it might be best to leave it at that.

I am, however, still very interested in any information that will rebut the psychological model of ME, and any similar disease, which the DWP are trying to fob people off by saying that it’s just psychological. And I completely agree with Neurasthenia Milkshake that there is something wider going on here. My guess is that the psychological origin of this and many other disorders is simply being driven by the insurers, like Unum. It also conforms to the ideology of the transatlantic Right, which includes Blairite Labour, that people taking leave off sick are essentially workshy malingerers, who should ‘pull themselves together’. Or have a ‘short, sharp shock’, and some other nonsense.

As for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, it has its uses as the only successful therapy in for anxiety disorders, including depression and Obsessive-Compuslive Disorder. Even here, its success rate is mixed and it doesn’t work for everyone.

It’s promotion by the Tories as a panacea for nearly every disorder and disease they can ascribe to psychological disorders reminds me of the 19th century fad, Couetism. Monsieur Couet was a French doctor, who believed people could improve their mental health by repeating the phrase ‘Every day, I am getting better and better’. Now, an optimistic attitude definitely has its benefits, but it won’t make one’s mental health automatically improve, and certainly not if there is something seriously wrong.

And I remember it most of all from one of the Pink Panther films, when the Commissionaire, finally released from the mental hospital, goes completely off the rails and becomes a Bond villain after another incident with Clouseau. The last image of him is of him frantically playing the organ, eye twitching manically, before he finally disappears into a puff of smoke, destroyed by his own laser weapon.

If only that would happen to those promoting this nonsense.