It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.
The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today…
But no. This is ‘ground breaking‘ we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?
State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:
“This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we’ve been able to demonstrate that you’ve got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.”
Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as “incitement” if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.
This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail… actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.
Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.
Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba’athists for example… and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too… and certain Serbian nationalists)… and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles ‘inciting’ not just ‘violence’ but calling for full blown wars.
Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as ‘freeborn Englishmen’ (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, “social cohesion” than a couple comically wacko racists.
Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and ‘essential’ media guardians of our liberal western order.
The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better… ten years tops… except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their ‘essential role’ and the ‘public interest’ of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.
“The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’.”
But they are! Britain’s political class use the msm to get into positions of political power – most obviously via elections. Democracy isn’t anything to do with freedom, as you well know.
As I’ve often said of the American MSM: their version of ‘speaking truth to power’ is “Oh, thank you sir!”
On the main theme of the post – the lack of editorial comment from the MSM (I haven’t even seen any of them defending this conviction, let alone denouncing it on free speech grounds as they would a few years ago) – it further disturbs me that none of the articles on this pair that I found on a quick scan of Google News allowed reader comments.
What I mean is that usually a paper like the Daily Mail has comments open on most of its stories. Didn’t seem to this time, though I admit I did not spend long looking.
Afraid of racist comments? But that’s what they have moderators for. I begin to wonder if what they fear is non-racist comments.
By the by, it was a serious presentational error for the authorities to have a guy with an Asian name as the public face of this. I am glad to see the enemies of freedom make presentational errors, but not glad about the racism this whole business and that aspect of it in particular will stir up.
I am not as familiar with this specific situation as many of you in Britain, but, as you surely know, it certainly is not limited in any way to your country.
Mark Steyn recently had a long, drawn out dispute with some Orwellian-named “Human Rights Commissions” in Canada because he dared to write some critical comments regarding Islam for a major magazine.
The various assaults and intimidations, including murders, that have occurred across Europe are also widely known, even if the media goes out of its way to soft-peddle what actually happened.
So, the question remains, “Why is this happening?”.
Why has the media, awash in it’s own mythology of heroic reporting and fearless investigations into highly sensitive subjects, celebrated in books and movies, and definitely in its own mind, developed this apparent queesiness when confronted with undisguised censorship?
There was a time in Europe, Britain, and North America when soceity was less developed, the state weaker, power more diffuse, the populations more stratified by class, or divided by language and culture.
In those days, and they were not so long ago, a major city like London or New York might have dozens of newspapers, in various languages, with multiple constituencies, espousing any number of viewpoints from the rational to the crackpot conspiritorial.
The loyalty of the staffs of many of those publications was to their niche readers, their neighborhood advertisers, a crusading editor, and not always to political parties, although there were those also, or other powerful elements who were indifferent, or even hostile, to the cares, concerns, thoughts, and emotions of the papers’ everyday readers.
But, just as there used to be dozens of makes of autos, or brands of flour, or shirtmakers, the passage of time has whittled these numbers down to a select few. For various economic and political reasons, the media have become self-absorbed and self-referential, and even the additional venues of movies, newsreels, radio, and television have slowly been absorbed into the edifice that “big media” has become.
Even as they claim to be centrist and objective, mostly for political and regulatory reasons, they have absorbed, and been absorbed into, the great swirling world of ultra-national, and trans-national, intellectual and moral assumptions and paradigms.
Their loyalties have been transferred from their readers and addressing their concerns to satisfying a new master—their peers.
Those who give awards in the never ending self-congratulatory circle jerk of prizes and trophies.
Those who move from media to academia to government to corporate and back again, controlling access and opportunity, denying the poor fools who are out of step, rewarding those who are reliable and dependable, who won’t ask the wrong questions, bring up inconvenient ideas, quibble over niceties like facts or ommissions.
Those who know that the story is supposed to spin this way, and never that way.
In a PC, multi-culti, authoritarian society, which is what I fear you have, and I fear we in the US are fast moving toward, loyalties only go up, not down.
Those who control the purse strings, the commissions, the regulators, the accesses that can be granted to the good, and pliable, and denied to the obdurate who can’t or won’t go along, decide what is and isn’t news.
“Tune in tomorrow night and hear Mr Thonpson explain everything. Mr Thompson has the solution to all our problems. Don’t forget to listen to Mr Thompson at 8 PM, on all channels.”
As the book says, no man can serve two masters.
Where did this notion that Journalism is particularly noble or essential for an informed populace come from?
Isn’t it kind of like knowing that the brain is the most important organ in your body, but then realizing who is telling you this?
Very retired: What you say is very true. I agree that the permissible scope for discussion has narrowed considerably and its limits aren’t defined by the defined not by the attitudes of the public but by the media elite themselves.
At the same time the blogosphere has exposed the cracks in their mythical social consensus.
For better or for worse, it seems to me that the defeat of white racism as a major cultural force was accomplished by the erection of new taboos the establishment of a new orthodoxy and the whip of social, professional and political stigmatization rather than any outbreak of tolerance or broadmindedness on the part of the populace.
While its defeat was undoubtedly a good thing I believe that the profoundly illiberal manner in which it was accomplished was regrettable.
An essentially positive outcome was arrived at by thoroughly foul means and this has had to many negative repercussions down the road
Whatever you believe about race these days in the privacy of your own head is pretty irrelevant. Having the wrong opinions about these issues is professional and social suicide so broadly speaking people with a stake in society don’t.
People higher up the socioeconomic pyramid aren’t less racist than those lower down because of any greater enlightenment on their part. They are because they have far more to lose by refuting the orthodoxy.
The defeat of racism in this manner has given the current cultural establishment the idea hat such authoritarianism is a fundamentally legitimate means by which to stamp their political and moral assumptions upon the populace.
The elite’s ideas about the evils of racism at least had the virtue of being essentially correct. Most of the other opinions they want to violently foist upon us are not.
Reading veryretired’s comment at July 12, 2009 02:31 AM (he’s always helpful to my state of mind) I was struck by the thought that, following on from much of education, health, and (fairly recently) charity, the UK government has now nationalised discrimination.
Best regards
treated rather differently, yet again: “”‘Kill soldiers’ Muslim blogger is back in job as Treasury civil servant””
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1199099/Kill-soldiers-Muslim-blogger-job-Treasury-civil-servant.html
Ah yes, Mr. Thompson, indeed.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice(Link) that came from the radio receiver—a man’s clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice that had not been heard on the airwaves for years—”Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear.”
Why, from journalists of course, silly!
Adil Khan. Good, solid, English name, that.
We can’t really blame the likes of Khan. It’s our own fault for enabling authoritarian and intolerant people like him to work for the state.
Some kind of vetting procedure should be used to weed out people with Mr Khan’s personality from public service.
pete,
I trust that’s a joke. The there is a certain authoritarian potential required to work in the public service (and more in some parts than others), while it is the public service so very often entails telling the public what to do.
You don’t think that was unintentional, do you?
My father knew people who were sent to the gas chambers – they included relatives.
However, I would stand for the right of any imoral person to say (or to print) that there were no gas chambers.
My father would also have been against people being put in prison for their opinions.
As for the leafleting of a Jewish house of worship – that was bad manners (to put it mildly). But even if there was a “no leaflets” sign, it is civil tresspass – no more.
This is the old idea that the law is about making people more moral (better people) – well even Aristotle may have supported this notion, but it is still just flat wrong.