What could be more absurd than censorship on campus? Per Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Guardian

Nick Cohen nails it in The Guardian:

'The intellectuals who excused Stalinist communism in the 1940s aren't so different from their grandchildren, who excuse radical Islam. Orwell was something of a "whoreophobe" himself and he warned his contemporaries: "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore."

Unless today's intellectuals want the same said of them they must end the censorship of debates that provoke no violence beyond the violently hurt feelings of the thin-skinned. They must prove the sincerity of their argument that religious reaction must be met with words, not arrests, by overcoming their cowardice and spitting out protests of their own.'

"Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus."

The much missed Christopher Hitchens on free speech. I don't agree with everything that he says but he always said it so well.

The trouble is that some people have trouble telling the difference between ignoring the speech they don't like and preventing other people from hearing it. Then they then try to use free speech as a defense for their own Orwellian ideas of suppressing other people.

"Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus." That applies as much to 'Islam is the religion of peace' as much as 'Climate change is a settled science'.

Patriotism and the English 'intellectual'

"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British."

George Orwell, 1941.

'all-right thinking people'

'At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. … Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.'

Hard to  argue with? That was George Orwell in "The Freedom of the Press"

More in Toby Young's Telegraph article from yesterday. 

Who was right - Aldous Huxley or George Orwell

Here is an interesting discussion document asking who was closer to predicting the future - George Orwell in "1984" or Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World"? Fascinating reading and if your interested then Neil Postman's book "Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business" would seem to be your next stop.




Thanks to Sand Monkey for the spot.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

It makes a change for this government to look to Animal Farm rather than the more usual 1984 for its George Orwell inspired legislation, but today's news that "Prospective MPs may no longer have to give their full address when standing for office, under plans being considered by the government." is an example. Apparently

"the government had to make sure voters "have the information they need" while ensuring MPs, candidates and their families "have the privacy they need"."

We will be tracked 24/7, they have privacy issues - marvellous.

George Orwell quotation

Bearing in mind my apparent fetish for referencing George Orwell's 1984 today, I thought that this George Orwell quotation taken from today's Samizdata blog was worth repeating here -

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

Living in Gordon Brown's New Labour Police State, now and in the future

Read this from England Expects and wonder at how we have allowed ourselves to end up living like this. A pensioner can be arrested and on his "stop and search form they said they wanted to speak to him, under the Terrorism Act, because he had been looking at a police officer...Once at the police station we were taken to separate rooms and questioned for about 45 minutes...Then officers went with us to our flat and searched it before returning us to the pub. We feel violated..."

As England expects says it is Constable Savage reborn. Constable Savage was a Not the Nine O'Clock News character in a sketch who arrested Mr Winston Kodogo for "Looking at me in a funny way". That 1980's sketch was attacking the police for being racist, now the police are more likely to arrest a pensioner for "looking at a police officer" and for having "been seen passing a white envelope" or for heckling a Labour Minister, remember Walter Wolfgang? This time it took eight police officers to arrest two disabled, innocent pensioners having a quiet drink in their local, next time they might be coming for you. As The Holloways sing so well:

"So this is great britain and welcome aboard
A sinking ship thats full of shit and someone nicked the oars
A failing false economy
an anti-punk automony
Our once unique Identity's
Been washed from our shores

...

In a land of hope and glory
do we really rule the waves?
The truth is a different story
We're all just a bunch of slaves"


Many more years of this New Labour government and our already reduced freedoms will be further diminished. Any freedoms left to us will be at the gift of the state, not ours as of right. We will belong to the state and Gordon will graciously allow us to live here; so long as we pay our taxes, carry our papers ID card, not protest, not speak out of turn, take part in the daily Two Minute Hate, listen to and believe only the Ministry of Truth (aka The BBC), not think out of turn, not do anything other than that that is the path chosen for us by the Great Clunking Fist. You can laugh and sneer at my view of our future, but think about it just a bit more and it gets less funny and more plausible.

Gordon Brown was compared to Stalin by his former top civil servant Lord Turnbull, once Whitehall's most senior mandarin, a man who said that Gordon Brown treated other senior ministers "with more or less complete contempt". Lord Turnbull said in the Financial Times, of Mr Brown's style: "You cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all." That is how he will increasingly treat the British public, with ruthlessness, to him we are no more than sponges there to be squeezed to extract ever larger tax revenue and to vote him back into power, election after fixed election, so he can proclaim the glorious success of yet another 5 year plan. We will all hail the "Brilliant Genius of Humanity" and marvel at "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly great people" and all will be well in Airstrip One.

Remember:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."

Thanks are due to George Orwell's 1984 and a biography of Stalin for most of the quotes in this piece.