The West is no longer the free West:

Tyrants of every stripe know full well that in order to have total control over the masses, there must be complete domination of the flow of information – and even thought itself. The cancelling of opinions and the censoring of ideas is how all totalitarian societies thrive and survive.

As Stalin once said: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.” And George Orwell put it this way: “The whole aim of Newspeak and Doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.”

The examples of this sort of thing are of course endless today, even in so-called free and democratic societies. And that makes it even scarier. Let me look at just two quite recent cases in point. Each one involves well known English gentlemen.

Dawkins

The famous atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has now been stripped of his Facebook account! What horrible thing did he do to deserve this fate? He merely tweeted that genetically male boxers should not be beating on women. He said this about the radical move by Fakebook:

“My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship? — Richard Dawkins, August 10, 2024”

There you go. I and millions of others have also spoken out about this appalling situation in Paris. I suppose we can all expect to be censored any day as well now. And by the way, in this case I will fully side with someone like Dawkins over all the woke-wonders in the IOC and the media. As to the madness that we have witnessed with these two boxers, especially the Algerian who took out gold, this new meme is worth sharing here:

Things that DON’T make someone male:

1. XY chromosomes
2. Testicles that manufacture sperm and testosterone
3. Adjusting your junk on international television

Things that make someone female:

1. A passport
2. A pic from childhood when you’re wearing pink
3. A grainy photo of a birth certificate that’s only 5 years old

Have I pretty much got it?

So now we have Dawkins experiencing what so many of us have experienced. I for one had my entire FB account taken down some years ago. I too know what ugly censorship looks like, as do so many other Christians and conservatives. And Dawkins now knows that what has made Western civilisation great has been Christianity, which is why he now says he is a “cultural Christian.”

Stephen McAlpine penned a good piece on this yesterday. Here is part of what he had to say:

Yes Richard, outright censorship. What did you expect of a society that has framed God out of the picture? Genuine liberal inquiry? As a friend of mine, David mused so wisely when we just discussed this issue just now:

“I sometimes wonder if the reason the soft-totalitarian left has been able to get so entrenched, is because of the culturally Christian commitment to classical liberalism. In wishing to think the best of the other by making space for alternative viewpoints, some with predominantly leftist viewpoints (who don’t recognise the validity of alternative viewpoints) were able to entrench themselves more-or-less unopposed. Once entrenched, they have had no interest in returning the favour of allowing alternative viewpoints. Dawkins is a classical liberal – and is astonished that without a strongly pervasive Christian culture, that classical liberalism will struggle to survive. I suspect the most extreme leftists take their cues from Marx – who philosophically only recognises power as the ultimate arbiter, and so feel perfectly right and moral in extinguishing spaces for alternative viewpoints.”

He concludes:

Dawkins is astonished by the censorship, and wonders why there was no spirited debate. Well there was no spirited debate, because that kind of debate is a vestige of the cultural Christianity he so admires. It didn’t spring up from the ether. Or the primordial ooze.

And there he was thinking it would be us that would shut him down. Turns out there are even more deeply religious zealots than we! Turns out when we get rid of God we simply outsource the role to ourselves. Richard Dawkins once promoted the atheistic slogan that was splashed all over buses in London back a decade or two ago, “There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life”.

Richard may not be worrying, but from the looks of his latest tweet, he’s not exactly enjoying his life either. https://stephenmcalpine.com/richard-dawkins-is-sad-hes-had-his-facebook-account-deleted-and-he-wants-to-know-xy/

Britain

The other major example of this has to do with the newly elected British PM. Ostensibly to deal with the rioting that has been taking place there the past few weeks, he now wants a major Orwellian crackdown on free speech and the social media.

What he has in mind is so bad and so far-reaching (it even goes beyond the UK) that even Elon Musk has weighed in on this, calling for free speech to be championed and the thought control police to be called off. He said this: “I’m FINISHED playing nice, this is War!”

A new piece in Spiked Online nicely discusses all this. Tom Slater begins his article with these words:

Britain has fallen. That’s been the take on the anti-woke chattersphere this past 24 hours, as prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-riots crackdown has taken an Orwellian turn. Alongside coming down hard on the violent racist thugs on our streets, a move no sane person has a problem with, Starmer has also trained his ire on the apparent cause of every societal ill, at least according to our ruling class: too much free speech on social media.

All week, the government has been calling on the Big Tech firms, particularly Elon Musk’s X, to do more to clamp down on misinformation and hate. Of course, we’ve seen plenty of both, online and off, recently. A lurid claim that the Southport child-killings, the spark for nearly two weeks of unrest, were committed by a Muslim asylum seeker swirled in the wake of that horror. But while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is passionately in favour of misinformation or hate, the past few days have reminded us of the sinister territory you enter into when the powers-that-be try to police them.

Since Musk has refused to play ball, even goading Starmer with accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ and feverish suggestions Britain is verging on ‘civil war’, the government has resorted to doing the silencing itself. Yesterday, we had director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson telling us that even a retweet could land you in an all-grey prison tracksuit. ‘You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred’, Parkinson told the PA news agency. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account last night, reminding Brits that ‘content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal’.

The latter post caught the attention of Musk, who retweeted it to his millions of followers….

Slater concludes:

More alarmingly, the British state is increasingly taking an interest in things people say in private. There have been a few cases now in which people in England have been convicted for racist posts made in private WhatsApp groups. In Scotland, the great, sinister innovation of Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act is that it forgoes the usual dwelling defence – a feature of existing hate-speech legislation that prohibits arrest over speech uttered in your own home. Now, any Scottish dinner-table chat could be a crime scene.

Certainly, incitement to violence, true threats and so on are crimes in every civilised society – even in America, where the First Amendment renders any censorship of speech and the press unconstitutional. But ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘grossly offensive’ speech are different things entirely. One man’s hatred is another man’s passionately held moral conviction. Offence is always in the eye of the beholder. We all think we know hate or offence when we see it, but at the end of the day everyone will draw the line slightly differently. You’re then left with someone having to decide, and nowadays that means someone like Keir Starmer – a man who until about five minutes ago thought it is ‘not right’ to say that only women can have a cervix.

The same goes for policing misinformation. Of course misinformation exists. The question is, who do you want to act as your Ministry of Truth? Big Tech? The state? Neither has a particularly encouraging track record. In 2020, Silicon Valley brutally suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, labelling it Russian disinformation, even though it later transpired to be legit. And if you’re comfortable with the state deciding what is and isn’t true then, let’s just say, you’re a much more trusting soul than most. Grimly, this seems to be another new frontier in British state-led censorship. The new Online Safety Act contains a ‘false communications offence’. A 55-year-old woman has just been arrested in Cheshire on suspicion of committing this offence and another, for her alleged role in spreading the rumour about the Southport killer being a Muslim asylum seeker. As much as I loathe those cranks who spread that bogus, inflammatory claim, cases like this will open Pandora’s Box where censorship is concerned.

The Very Online Right’s telling of recent days, that Keir Starmer has all but taken power in a post-riots coup, is obviously a fantasy. For one thing, his crackdown is being prosecuted using existing laws, passed by Labour and Conservative governments over decades. The Online Safety Act passed last year, another signal achievement of those freedom-loving Tories. But that doesn’t mean our fight for free speech is any less important, or that the task ahead of us is at all simple or straightforward. At least a despot could potentially be toppled. Normality could then quickly resume. In the UK in 2024, being locked up for saying things is kind of normal. And it has been for a very, very long time. https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/09/think-before-you-post-britains-slide-into-censorship/

The words of Sir Robert Menzies in The Forgotten People (1942) are just as relevant now as when they were first uttered:

All things considered, the worst crime of fascism and its twin brother, German national socialism, is their suppression of free thought and free speech. It is one of the many proofs that, with all their cleverness, they are primitive and reactionary movements. One of the first actions of the Nazis in Germany was to regiment the newspapers by telling them exactly what they could print. The result was that newspaper controversy came to an end, since all sang the same tune….

Fascism and the Nazi movement are both based on social philosophy which elevates the all-powerful State and makes the rights of the individual, not matters of inherent dignity but matters merely of concession by the State. Each says to the ordinary citizen, “Your rights are not those you were born with, but those which of our kindness we allow you.” It is good to be reminded by Mill that this tendency is not confined to any one country.

We are living in really frightening times. Many of us had thought that we would learn from history here. We saw what the Communists had done in the past. We saw what Hitler did in the past. We see what is occurring in North Korea and Communist China today.

But it seems we have NOT learned from history, or current events. So now it seems we will be doomed to repeat it.

[1948 words]