Telling people what they do not wish to hear is a dangerous business. As George Bernard Shaw put it: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh otherwise they’ll kill you.” History alas is hardly testament to mankind’s bonhomie, awash as it is with the bodies of those who died for their beliefs; not to mention the poor souls born before the policy of ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ became fashionable.
While modern society’s attitude to the truth is somewhat more benign (death is rarely on the cards these days), our sense of humour has not improved. Honesty is still the ‘revolutionary act’ Orwell spoke of, with censure, cancellation, financial penalties and even jail time awaiting those who fail to sing from the approved hymn sheet.
Opposition to the liberal consensus on progressive issues is a case in point. Anyone who questioned the logic of transgender ideology was cast as a social pariah. Graham Linehan famously had his life destroyed, while in other parts of the Commonwealth parents were jailed for ‘misgendering’ their children. The obvious truth of course is that men in dresses are not women, neither is it advisable to encourage children to mix and match their genitals. The Cass Review has come and gone, yet the apologies are conspicuous by their absence.
Covid was much the same, with anyone ‘questioning the science’ decried as ‘antivaxxers’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’. Globally, governments concurred that penalty was the solution, and those failing to roll their sleeves up were fined, isolated, locked down, denied healthcare, dismissed from work and even threatened with jail time. The truth on vaccine injuries is now beginning to leak out, but again the apologies are muted.
As the list of truths the authorities do not wish the citizenry to notice expands, it makes sense to organise them under one umbrella: ‘hate speech.’ You are now, for instance, more likely to be arrested in central London for holding up a sign saying ‘Hamas are terrorists’ than you are for openly calling for genocide as a Hamas terrorist. Nowhere is this hostility to truth more apparent, bizarrely, than when one makes reference to the official figures.
Consider the recent €6,000 fine and criminal record handed down to Alternative für Deutschland politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, for the crime of restating the Government’s own figures on the disproportionate number of Afghan refugees who commit rape in Germany. In Britain, keen-eyed members of the public are similarly discouraged.
The Press Complaints Commission considered it ‘racist’ of Rod Liddle to notice that young black men were committing the majority of violent crime in London, even though as Sadiq Khan will tell you any day of the week:
Black Londoners are disproportionately represented as victims and offenders for all categories of serious violence. Some 62% of homicide victims and 65% of offenders are Black Londoners.
Jeremy Corbyn thought it the height of bad taste for Sarah Champion to infer that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”, although had he read the Government’s own reports into the matter, he might well have concluded Pakistani Muslims were hugely overrepresented in grooming gangs.
It was also clearly impolite of Emmanuel College Cambridge fellow Dr. Nathan Cofnas to quote Harvard’s own admission figures when speaking about race differences in intelligence, a crime for which he was subsequently dismissed:
If Harvard admitted students based on their academic qualifications alone, Harvard would be 43% Asian, 38.4% white, 0.7% black, and 2.4% Hispanic.
Unlike other nations, the British Government is terribly squeamish about publishing sensitive data it does not believe to be ‘in the public interest’. The Home Office is not interested in sharing migrant crime data for instance, nor the number of small boats blocked from crossing the Channel. Certain information does slip through the net, and when the public starts drawing conclusions it is always met with the same combative retort, “So what?” That was former Home Secretary, Sajid Javid’s response to the highlighting of ONS figures that London, Manchester and Birmingham are now all minority white cities. In other words, “How dare you notice?”
I’ll tell you “so what?”, Sajid: why collect such data in the first place if it has no implications for societal cohesion or Government policy? Why criminalise citizens who fail to comply with data collection exercises like the census, if those exercises are merely academic enquiries? And why is it only certain inconvenient truths that you object to?
Like NPR CEO Katherine Mayer, the authorities appear to have concluded that “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done” – i.e., failing to reach the promised multicultural nirvana. One can only hope it is proving so distracting. A society based on convenient lies rather than uncomfortable truths is one in which I’d rather not participate.
Frank Haviland is author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and Editor of the New Conservative, where this article first appeared.
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Rod Liddle is something of a hero of mine for for the following candid explanation he gave in a Spectator article for not pursuing his desire to become a teacher. “I couldn’t remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids.I’d be right in there on day one. Even then, I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten as it’s now called.” He deserves a prize for chutzpah at least.
Have the Left lost all sense of humour? The humour in Liddle’s comment and indeed the whole article totally spooked Owen Jones who led an army of condemnation against Rod Liddle. Context is everything! The trap these days is Poe’s Law, extended to the media and chattering classes generally: without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views. Having played Pied Piper to attract and rid the town of hysterical rats who believed the world was ending, was he not paid? He seems to have led all the townsfolk straight into the Hamelin, identified by their downticks, excoriating comments and devotion to their sacred cow of NSPCC, straight into the Weser!
https://www.facebook.com/owenjones84/posts/in-this-article-published-by-the-spectator-rod-liddle-says-the-one-thing-stoppin/3587046731388813/
Owen Jones deserves to be ‘spooked’ and more Roy.
Dark humour is lost on the left and feminists alike. The NSPCC clings to the myth of post Victorian child asexuality. As mentioned above, some truths people would kill over hence people like Jimmy Car or Franky Boil (in the pre woke days).
The excellent essay on the subversion of the West, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali ( shared on this site a few days back ) goes some way to explaining the above, and then some. She refers to ex-KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov’s description of this process, which involves 4 phases: demoralization, destabilization, crisis then normalization. This makes sense, as we look at the changes taking place in our society, which is fast becoming unrecognisable, when compared to when we were all growing up in various decades of history. Certainly, there are many things being normalized nowadays that most definitely would not have been tolerated when I was growing up, and they have nothing to do with ‘progress’. An excerpt;
”Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.
The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture.
In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.
Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.
Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.
The ultimate intended outcome is that the afflicted willingly embrace self-destructive behaviors and ideas. Thus, all moral constraints can be eschewed in the pursuit of “just” and “virtuous” causes.
What else can explain the daily displays of moral panic attacks masquerading as righteous activism, from the destruction of artwork to self-immolation? As human life ceases to look inviolable, we might also expect measures like euthanasia to gain steam, not just to help end terminal anguish but to end all manner of non-debilitating hardship.”
https://www.thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-we-have-been-subverted
It is indeed an excellent article.
I’ve read this (with some uneasiness) exactly to this sentence (which is less than halfway through it):
When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists
This ‘democracy’ has been so overrun by terrorists that its military has been on an eight month bombing spree in Gaza now and if there’s anything ‘we’ in the so-called west don’t need, it’s more liars trying to recruit us as moral foot soldiers for their political pet causes.
A cheeky re-share, because I finally got round to finishing watching Tommy Robinson’s new documentary ( Lawfare: A Totalitarian State ) last night, so I can safely say it’s excellent. 100% applicable to the article above. It’s a truism that the Leftards don’t brook any dissent, and examples of this are everywhere. Farmers protesting in Brussels this week were being labelled ”far-right extremists”, carry your country’s flag you’re labelled the same ( but a flag of jihad and you’re left well alone ) or a ”football hooligan”. Today on Twitter I saw that a Jew in London, who was wearing his scull cap and draped with an Israeli flag, was arrested for ”antisemitism”. Yes, really. ”If you’re not with us, you’re against us”, that’s what it amounts to. Anyway, Tommy nails it with this highly accurate, professional and articulate film. I see he’s organizing another gathering of patriots in London on July 27th;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUGufiKTm6Q&ab_channel=UrbanScoop
Thanks for the review Mogs. I will have a watch.
Hope you enjoy it, hux. I’m pretty confident you will. Come back and let us know what you thought, whenever you get around to it. Same goes for anyone else who fancies leaving a brief post on what they thought of it. He really goes full-on ‘Braveheart’ towards the end, bless him. Great speech.
I remember seeing the footage of the disgusting way the police in Wales treat completely peaceful protesters who were protesting against hundreds of migrants being housed in their community. Exact same treatment in a similar scenario in Ireland. The police aren’t policing, they’re literally just thugs and complete bastardos at that! If you don’t submit they’ll just beat you into submission, quick sharp. But you’ll see ex-policemen in the film talking about that.
My theory is that if you’re a halfway decent human being you wouldn’t join the police in the first place, hence those prone to the thuggery and bastardy come to the fore.
Or, if you are naive and join to do good, you would soon realise your mistake and leave.
The police these days, including Chief Vegetables, seem fine with obeying their oppressive political masters and are ready to teargas-spray, truncheon, put the boot in and two-tier placate or bully whomever/whenever they’re instructed. Orders – orders from above!
Protests against the undemocratic decisions made by rotten politicians are not tolerated and the police are the willing tools of rank traitors who deserve to be locked up.
What kind of copper can go to a woman’s house and arrest her in the middle of making her kids’ dinner when she has simply stated the truth on social media that a man is not a woman? Surely it would be better to resign there and then rather than stay in the Thought Police?
Labour have accused Sunak of lying over the likely tax hikes in their plans.
Does anyone remember how many times Labour accused the Conservatives of privatising the NHS, yet we are still lumbered with that white elephant.
They both blame the Doctors strikes for the delays in NHS treatment, but we know it was mainly Lockdowns wot done it. But neither kneeler or Sanook can admit the Lockdowns, or the BBC they’re reporting the News on. What was that Orwell quote again about the State always being right.
I wouldn’t tell anyone if I thought they were ugly or fat. That wouldn’t be nice, but they simply have to be told if they are ignorant or don’t know what they are talking about. Sometimes the truth simply has to be told eg ——-Net Zero is a scam.
At least with NET Zero, if you can’t tell’em, you can show’em.
We might suffer the consequences as well, but we will have the satisfaction of being shown to be correct. After all, even we like to think we are right.
We are already pretty much in a totalitarian society, Starmer’s election will be the nail in the coffin of democracy.https://www.change.org/p/free-sam-melia-uk-political-prisoner?source_location=search