Censorship, the tool of tyrants
Our mother may have been 13 years old when it happened. She had always been a keen reader - she found her father’s copy of ‘Madame Bovary’ tucked behind the other books at home, so from then on she knew where to look for the good stuff.
But on this day, possibly in May 1933, she went into the school library as usual, to find big gaps all over the shelves. Works by Communists, Jews and other political undesirables were all gone.
Soon enough, it went further. The history teacher was removed and the school caretaker took his place, for as Orwell observed, who controls the past controls the future. The teachers all joined the Party; like schoolteachers in the left-wing 1970s Inner London Educational Authority, they knew which side their bread was buttered.
Mother was the only child in that school who didn’t join the Hitlerjugend, but then Opa was a gentleman farmer with sixty hands and was damned if he’d be run by scabby social inferiors - the local ne’er-do-well was appointed gauleiter and enjoyed wielding his authority, by George. Eventually even Opa couldn’t stand against the tide: I read one of his letters replying to an official demand for horses for the Army, and although my German is weak I could tell that his tone was very careful, as though reasoning with a tiger; this, from a man habitually gruff and blunt, like others of his class in East Prussia.
Now it’s back. Same race, different dogs: get them excited, start the hare, open the traps. What the greyhounds don’t know is that there’s no plan to let them grow old.
In our mother’s time, it was to Make Germany Great Again, and the children’s two hours’ exercise a day, the adult-led gangs with their vigorous outdoor pursuits to rechannel sexual energies and inculcate habits of conformity, the autobahn network spidering out to the national borders; all formed part of the militaristic vision.
Let’s do conspiracy-speak. Today, the people pulling the strings aren’t nationalists; quite the opposite, in fact. Nor are they internationalists-for the-people, like the Trotskyites. Instead, they seem to be representatives of an almost godlike global wealth class. Some may see the centralisation of financial power as desirable and offering opportunities for personal enrichment; so for them, opposition should be rooted out. Others (like Klaus Schwab, if I read him right) think the Great Reset is merely inevitable and that our focus should be on mitigating its disbenefits for the working (and increasingly for the white-collar) classes; so resistance is not only pointless but worse, hinders the process of adapting.
Perhaps Schwab’s analysis is closer to the truth, and the actions of the West’s power class are more like an almost passive surrender to vast impersonal forces; always easier to go with the flow, to do well personally out of seeming to do good for the country, to solve today’s budget problems at tomorrow’s expense; to be dust on the current slowly circling the sinkhole. How else to explain the UK’s cross-party support for immigration and an ever-swelling population on an island that might, absent high civilisation, fossil fuels and food imports, sustainably support six million?
Western elites remind me of businessmen I used to meet, who told me their enterprise was a ‘cash cow’ and ‘would see them out.’ By contrast, the traditional Chinese peasantry were said to plan for the seventh generation ahead, and the modern CCP takes a similarly long view, convinced that socialism will triumph over Western capitalism.
Where China scores is in exploiting nationalism rather than deploring it. President Xi Jinping spoke recently (30 July) of ‘holding high the banner of patriotism and socialism’ and in
…rallying the people's support and pooling their strength to promote harmony in relations among political parties, ethnic groups, religious sectors, social strata, and compatriots at home and abroad.
It may not be too cynical to interpret ‘promote harmony’ as implying the vigorous suppression of those who don’t fit in, ideologically or genetically. The Han Chinese are, or are to be, united in land, blood and culture; under the flag of, well, national socialism and a supreme leader. Those who characterise the Austrian corporal’s regime as ‘right-wing’ fundamentally misunderstand it; he and Stalin, both of them evil and psychopathic, built their platforms on opposing privilege and when their pact dissolved the Russians called it the Great Patriotic War, not the Great Ideological War. Third time lucky, with Xi and China’s purer-than-Russia form of communism?
What core cultural strength has the West to withstand such a challenge? The economic liberalism embraced by free-traders has undermined social cohesion, and foreseeably so: the late Sir James Goldsmith clearly spelled out the implications of the GATT talks in 1994. As a French Euro-MP he saw the impact on families of low pay and underemployment as the EU exploited its four freedoms, especially the freedom of movement that allowed capital to arbitrage labour force costs, and the freedom of capital that let businesses incorporate wherever they would pay the least tax.
Then there is the admixture of people from countries that are more violent and intolerant than we have become used to; eastern Europe, the Middle East, Somalia and so on. We here had our uprisings and rebellions and Puritans and revolutions long ago; it has taken centuries of bloody conflict to make an alloy of British identities. Now we are introducing new hot elements, who are mostly relieved to be away from Third World chaos, corruption and poverty; but in the case of adherents to the youngest Abrahamic religion, some of their children - eager, like all youngsters, for a short-cut to the power of their elders - are being seduced into the modern version of life-hating, self-righteous puritanism.
What unites us? Not the old assumed order of things, the ‘God, King and Country’ (and class privilege) that empowered WWI General Sir Oliver Nugent to boast (p. 139 here) that ‘a double decker London omnibus would hold all the men he intended to bring home alive’ - and to expect his peers to admire him for it! Those days are gone, and a rainbow flag celebrating diversity is not enough to rally all the people under it, especially those with a religious objection to homosexual acts.
Our authorities are in a double bind. On the one hand they wish for everybody to coexist peaceably, to live and let live; on the other, they face an element that sees suspension of judgment as weakness, if not wickedness, compared with their own solid certainty. It is Osama bin Laden’s strong horse against the weak horse, Nassim Taleb’s dictatorship of the small minority.
In China they understand that there can be only one ruler under the sun, and so they persecute the Uyghurs systematically and horribly, separating children from parents to break the chain of family influence and ‘promote harmony.’
Here, things are held together so far by our good fortune, living as we do in an age of relative affluence and a generous, though gradually weakening Welfare State; plus a combination of propaganda and censorship. The latter is administered not only by robots and halfbrained social media supervisors but by police who are so busy online that they cannot spare the resources to tackle more old-fashioned crimes - though they can spare six officers to handcuff an elderly man for sharing a meme about the rainbow flag; liberalism enforced by illiberal means. There is as much danger in jamming the lid on the pressure cooker as in allowing inflammatory free speech.
The laxity in controlling socio-economic forces in Britain has turned us from an easygoing political culture to a nascent tyranny.
The situation is not helped by the proposed Online Harms Bill, with its ill-defined terms that are bound to be exploited by prosecutors - and the provision that even lets the Home Secretary personally decide what is harmful:
The proposal to fine social media companies for failing to monitor content and act promptly smells like yet another excuse for tax revenue. The commercial response will be to rub out anything controversial and subject us to death-by-cute-kittens; perhaps ailurophobes can make a compensation case out of that!
Unless and until we can persuade religious extremists to be as undogmatic as most modern British Christians, and the quarrelsome populace to refrain from denouncing one another for electronic wrongthink and offensive humour, we run the risk of having too many holes for the little Dutch boy to plug, and a future of recurrent terrorist incidents and civil disorders.