I'm flipping through a dog-eared copy of Hamlet in a quiet pub, the kind where the wood creaks with history and the beer's still honest. Shakespeare's words—raw, human, eternal—cut through the noise of a world obsessed with tearing itself apart. Yet, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Bard's birthplace, they're "decolonising" him, slapping trigger warnings on his quills because his genius, apparently, props up "white supremacy." Across the Atlantic, The 1619 Project peddles a tale that America's founding was just a slave market in disguise, shrugging off the Constitution's audacity with a sneer. It's as if the West, drunk on guilt, is flogging its own back, desperate to erase the very achievements that made it free and prosperous. How deep does this sickness run? And when you're addicted to hating your own story, where does the tale end?
The New Criterion calls it "narcissistic self-flagellation," a Western quirk that James Burnham dubbed the "suicide of the West." It's a frenzy of tearing down what's great to prove you're good. How do you measure a civilisation's craving for such poison? One yardstick is how viciously it attacks its cornerstones—the ideas, art, and events that shaped its soul. The American Revolution, birthing a republic where people, not kings, held sway, gets recast as a pro-slavery plot by the 1619 Project. Never mind that historians, from Gordon Wood to Sean Wilentz, shredded its claims as fiction; it snagged a Pulitzer and wormed into thousands of U.S. classrooms, per a 2023 NEA report. In Britain, the Magna Carta—sealed at Runnymede in 1215, the bedrock of common law—gets a side-eye from The Parekh Report (2000), which frets that "Britishness" reeks of racism. Being "English"? That's just "white," says the report, a sin to be qualified with hyphens: Black British, Indian British, anything but plain old British.
This isn't just academic navel-gazing. It's a cultural rot that's spread like damp in an old house. Universities, those factories of ideas, churn out anti-Western dogma faster than you can say "critical theory." A 2024 Times Higher Education survey found 68% of UK humanities courses now include "decolonisation" modules, questioning everything from Newton to Austen. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, per a March 2025 Telegraph report, is scrubbing the Bard's legacy to atone for "epistemic violence" and "colonialism." Trigger warnings flag his plays as "racist, sexist, homophobic," as if art should come with a moral diaper. It's not about understanding Shakespeare's humanising spirit—his ability to make us see ourselves in Othello or Shylock—it's about reducing him to a prop for guilt.
The West's not alone in having a past, but it's unique in obsessing over its sins. China doesn't agonise over the Cultural Revolution's millions dead; it builds skyscrapers. The Middle East doesn't "decolonise" its poetry; it recites it. Only the West, as Burnham saw, ties itself in knots, driven by a liberalism that's less about freedom and more about self-loathing. X users like @TRHLoomer call it "woke suicide," pointing to the 1619 Project's $30 million NYT-backed rollout as proof the elites hate their own roots. "The West's begging to be conquered by cultures that don't apologize for existing."
How severe is this addiction? Look at the damage. Cultural institutions—museums, libraries, theaters—are rewriting their missions to prioritise "inclusion" over truth. The British Museum, per a 2024 Guardian report, plans to "recontextualise" artifacts to highlight "imperial harm," as if the Parthenon Marbles are just stolen loot, not a shared human legacy. Education's hit harder: a 2023 U.S. Department of Education study found 35% of K-12 schools now teach "anti-Western" frameworks, up from 10% in 2010. Political discourse? Poisoned. The Parekh Report's claim that Britain needs to "work through" its empire has birthed policies like open borders, which 60% of Brits now oppose, per a 2025 YouGov poll, fuelling AfD-style backlashes across Europe.
Severity shows in numbers, too. Cultural confidence correlates with societal health—birth rates, civic engagement, trust. The West's crumbling on all three. Europe's fertility rate is 1.5, the U.S. 1.6, Australia 1.58, per 2024 UN data, all below replacement. Trust in institutions? Down to 30% in the U.S., per Gallup 2025, and 25% in the UK. Voter turnout's tanking—65% in the 2024 U.S. election, lowest since 1988. When you teach people their history's a crime, why stick around to fix it? We're raising kids to hate the West, then wondering why they don't care about its future.
What's feeding this? Universities are ground zero, as The New Criterion notes, but the roots go deeper. Post-WWII prosperity gave the West leisure to navel-gaze, while Marxism's long march through academia, per a 2023 City Journal analysis, framed history as oppression. Feminism, civil rights—noble fights—morphed into tools for grievance, where every achievement (Magna Carta, Shakespeare) is a sin to atone for. Media's complicit: The 1619 Project's glossy NYT spread wasn't journalism; it was propaganda, bankrolled by elites who profit from division. And politics? Leaders like Tony Blair, with his Parekh Report, or Biden's DEI mandates, per a 2024 WSJ op-ed, signal that self-criticism is virtue, even when it fractures society.
Where does it end? Some have warned of a "new Dark Age," and the path's clear if trends hold. Low birth rates mean shrinking economies—Japan's GDP's flat since 1995, a warning for the West. Cultural erosion fuels fragmentation: the U.S. is 40% non-white, per 2024 Census data, but "diversity" policies, like those in The Parekh Report, deepen tribalism, not unity. A 2025 Pew study predicts 70% of Americans will feel "alienated" from their government by 2030. Europe's no better—Germany's AfD at 26%thrives on backlash to this guilt-trip. Collapse doesn't need barbarians at the gate; it's internal, a slow bleed of confidence and cohesion.
A Dark Age wouldn't be medieval mud huts, but it could mean fractured states, where trust's gone and power's raw. Careers, like those women are chasing, vanish when economies tank—2008's crash cut 8 million U.S. jobs, per BLS; a bigger one's looming. Cultural treasures? Looted or forgotten, as Rome's libraries were. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's "decolonised" exhibits might survive as relics of a culture that hated itself too much to endure. An X user warns: "We're burning our heritage to stay warm. Good luck rebuilding when the fire's out."
But collapse isn't fate. The West's survived self-doubt before—post-Reformation wars, 1960s unrest. It needs a cultural reset: teach kids Shakespeare's humanity, not his "harm." Celebrate the Magna Carta, not its supposed "racist connotations." Immigration? Integrate, don't appease, as 65% of Aussies want, per a 2025 Lowy Institute poll. And call out the elites—academics, media, politicians—who profit from guilt while dodging its costs. A flicker of shame, as The New Criterion spots in the Trust's secrecy, suggests not all's lost. Yet.
I'm closing my Hamlet, the pub's glow fading. The West's flogging itself, but it's not dead yet. The question is whether we'll keep swinging the whip or drop it to rebuild. Self-flagellation's a choice, not a sentence—unless we make it one.
https://newcriterion.com/article/a-mission-of-guilt/
"How can one estimate the severity of a civilization's addiction to pathological sentiments? Surely one measure is the extent to which the civilization attacks, repudiates, or otherwise undermines its key cultural achievements. As far as we have been able to determine, this pathology is peculiarly Western. The political philosopher James Burnham spoke in this context of the "suicide of the West." Burnham thought the phenomenon inseparable from a certain species of frenetic but world-weary liberalism. Examples are not far to seek. The great factory for the production of such poisonous ideas, and the emotions upon which they feed, is the modern university, which seems never to have discovered an anti-Western idea it could not endorse.
But what began in the university long ago seeped out into the culture at large. Think, for example, of "The 1619 Project," that lavishly funded darling of The New York Times and anti-American educators across the country. We reported at length on the initiative a few years back when it took the world by storm. Arguing that the United States was founded as a "slavocracy" and that the American Revolution was fought to preserve the institution of slavery, The 1619 Project made up for its utter lack of historical accuracy with an abundance of nauseating, politically correct smugness. Widely excoriated by responsible historians across the political spectrum, it nevertheless won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times and went on to insinuate its anti-American toxin in thousands of schools across the country.
The 1619 Project follows the template established for such malevolently frivolous exercises in nihilistic disestablishment: seize upon some ostentatiously successful political or cultural endeavor, and then subject it to the pressure of ideological inversion. The American Revolution was the consolidation of a world-historical political event: the conflict out of which a constitutional republic where the people were sovereign was born. How tedious to come along and say "Oh, no, what really mattered was the Portuguese slave trade."
America does not have a monopoly on this sort of narcissistic self-flagellation. The Brits are also experts. When you hear the word "Runnymede," what is your first thought? If you said "Magna Carta and the codification of the rule of law," go to the head of the class. It was at Runnymede in 1215 that King John set his seal to the founding document of British common law. You might think that was a good thing. But according to The Parekh Report, also known as "The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain," published in 2000 under Tony Blair's government by the Runnymede Trust, it is highly problematic, not least because the word "British" has "racial [read: racist] connotations." And if being "British" is bad, it is nothing compared to being "English." "To be English," the report continues, is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable when suitably qualified—Black British, Indian British, British Muslim and so on. . . . Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness is racially coded.
The report also maintained that "There has been no collective working through of the imperial experience." Among the many questions put by "The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain" was "what should be preserved, what jettisoned, what revised or reworked" in the pursuit of an "inclusive society."
That process of revision looks like a growth industry—possibly the only one—for the Brits these days. In March, the London Telegraph reported that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon is busy "decolonizing" Shakespeare because the Bard has been used to promote "white supremacy," "epistemic violence," and other bad things. Yes, really. Responding to recommendations made by Helen Hopkins of Birmingham City University, the SBT is dedicating itself to creating "a more inclusive museum experience." According to the Telegraph,
This process includes exploring "the continued impact of Empire" on the collection, the "impact of colonialism" on world history, and how "Shakespeare's work has played a part in this."
As usual, this politically correct effort to be "inclusive" involves a large-scale process of exclusion. Among the trust's vast collection of material about Shakespeare, we learn, are items that may contain "language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful." These must be fitted with moral codpieces in the form of trigger warnings where they are not simply expunged or hidden from view.
Shakespeare, of course, is merely a synecdoche, an example of British, and by extension Western, values. It is true that Shakespeare's generous and humanizing spirit exemplifies Western values. But is that a bad thing? Celebration of Shakespeare, we read, represents "white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly 'West-centric' worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today." Compared to what? Might it be that "Anglo-centric," "Eurocentric," and "West-centric" values have actually done more to make the world free and prosperous than the essentially tribal values of most other cultures? We merely ask.
The trust has neglected to publicize the actual report making these absurd recommendations. We don't blame them. And we might add that we regard their reticence as a promising sign, since it may suggest that some rudimentary sense of shame or embarrassment continues to flicker in the musty caverns of their consciences."