Worthy of censorship by Antifa and the Democratic Party (nearly identical), read Robinson Crusoe now before it’s banned.
Leftist professors want to “decolonize bookshelves” (translation: ban books advocating Judaism and Christianity, capitalism, and Western values), so everyone must read this 1719 masterpiece.
This is not merely “a boy’s book”, although I think it would do wonders for males who have fathers who have not grown a pair. After all, if you were shipwrecked, what would you do to survive? Can you imagine any soy boy like the flaccid Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey being stranded on an island for nearly three decades?
Robinson Crusoe is a simple read, taking at most two days, if only because the early eighteenth-century syntax could be cumbersome. For example, almost all of page 197 in chapter 15 of this imprint is a lugubrious one sentence. However, beyond the seemingly naïve narrative are some profound ideas that would definitely agitate people like the Antifa domestic terrorists causing damage to property and killing people who disagree with their thug behavior, including the following:
- God has a providential concern for all of His creatures. Crusoe acknowledges this, even though he mentions killing cats and penguins (chapter 9), which would trigger any leftist to the point of condemning the book on this matter alone as a violation of animal rights.
- Capitalism works; even though Crusoe is removed from his investments for nearly three decades, he becomes wealthy because of wise financial planning.
- Albeit professing a Protestant version of Christianity, the faith gives Crusoe the intellectual and emotional support he needed to overcome his own sinfulness and to persevere during his years of hardship.
- European colonialism had positive effects on the Caribbean and Latin America. Although Defoe recognizes and apparently is immune to the evil of slavery, pagan cannibalism was rightfully stopped by European Christianity, not only from Protestant Britain but also Catholic Spain and Portugal. (Yes, leftist professors, the South American natives were cruel and unjustified in eating fellow human beings.)
- Crusoe advocates religious toleration. His calls his man Friday a Protestant (although it is doubtful that Friday realizes that he is such, since he was taught only Crusoe’s version of Christianity), admires a Catholic Spaniard for his fidelity and loyalty, and respects Friday’s cannibal father while exhorting him not to kill fellow human beings. Would that the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian Democratic Party could exercise such religious toleration! (It cannot, of course, since Democratic policies are inherently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian.)
Some elements are simply incredible, in the sense of not being believable as, for example, when he says that “I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life” (page 146, chapter 12). C’mon! Starting off as a nineteen-year-old and progressing to his forties, Crusoe didn’t once have an erection? Oh well, Defoe is definitely not a twentieth-century or later writer steeped in sex like most are.
Other elements might be offensive. Crusoe talks disrespectfully about “priestcraft even amongst the most blinded ignorant pagans in the world” (page 226, chapter 18) and expresses his reluctance to becoming Catholic if he were to return to Brazil (page 286, chapter 21). However, twenty-first century readers can tolerate these incredulities as a puritanical view of life dominant in eighteenth century Britain and can disregard the anti-Catholic barbs as ineffective insults…
Unless, of course, one is an Antifa-loving politician in the useless and lawless Democratic Party.