UPDATE: Re illiberalism, we can turn our attention from Alina Lippe to the UK-domestic case of Graham Phillips, as discussed in Peter Hitchens’ MoS column 31 July.
The psychologist Carl Jung believed in coincidences that aren’t, which he termed ‘synchronicity.’ Maybe this is another case.
For some time I’ve wanted to buy the DVD of the Beiderbecke Tapes trilogy. Made in the later 1980s, it tells stories of a couple of Northern schoolteachers and their unasked-for adventures. The style is gently ironic and is typically British in disliking and mocking the powerful, from the martinet headteacher to cabals of businessmen and overlicensed Secret State creeps.
We got the set a few days ago and have finished the second yarn, which is about an audiotape accidentally-on-purpose included in a bunch of classic jazz recordings, that seems to reveal a plot to dump nuclear waste in the Yorkshire Dales, one of the most beautiful areas of Britain. I hope you don’t mind the plot-spoiling - the broadcast is now 35 years old.
A tall, grim gentleman turns up at the couple’s home, having previously burgled it while they were out. He failed to find the tape and now demands it, with threats of broken bones; he’s told first that they threw it in the canal, and later that it is in a ‘safe place.’
Subsequently the home is raided by six other men from a different branch of the security services, armed and without identification or warrant. When the couple go to Holland to join a school trip they are followed - stalked - by these thugs, who later are thrashed (to our cheers, of course) by a group of Scots in Edinburgh.
Our first greyman has a change of heart and explains to the couple that the whole thing has been a ‘disinformation’ exercise. The tape was deliberately leaked to the female partner who has an interest in local politics and environmental issues; the powers that be had hoped she would pass it to the news media, causing a kerfuffle that would subside when it was officially announced that the radioactive waste would ‘only’ be dumped in some less attractive place occupied by people who don’t matter, such as Sheffield.
Today, information technology has bred a race of supercreeps. Machines with limitless processing capability read not only your social media posts but your very emails, working hand in glove with commercial advertisers and even worse, government agencies. Together with the spying comes censorship - we all know of suppression of voices on Twitter, Facebook etc - disinformation and the abuse of legal and executive powers.
Take for example the recent case of the German journalist Alina Lipp, who went to eastern Ukraine to report her findings there. According to the Chilean-American journalist Gonzalo Lira, also in that region, Lipp’s reports seem truthful; but because what she says does not fit what we have all, in this postmodern world of ‘no such thing as truth’, learned to call the official Western ‘narrative’, she is punished.
Lipp received a letter from the prosecutor’s office in the German federal government, accusing her of supporting the Russians and threatening her with a fine or three years in prison when she returns home. Meanwhile the government has extracted €1,600 from her bank account and closed her (Russian-born) father’s account into the bargain.
This profoundly illiberal approach must ultimately undermine trust in authority; we shall end up like Soviet Russia, where nothing the State says is believed. The threads connecting society together are already worn dangerously thin; but unlimited power enables the development of monstrous stupidity. Destabilisation will come from above, not from below.