04/23/2009
Hal G. P. Colebatch writes from Australia, still a fairly free country:BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.He mentions a number of cases of persecution like the case of a "14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher’s first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: "It’s racist, you're going to get done by the police!" Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed." John Derbyshire wrote about this case for VDARE.com: The War Against White Trashand Kathy Shaidle has written about similar activities in Canada.There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution’s principal tasks was "to alter people’s actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people’s psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out.[Thought police muscle up in Britain, The Australian, April 21, 2009]
Now there’s a bill before the Judiciary Committee, HR 1913, that threatens to bring this kind of thought control to the United States.
Leftists insist that we're being paranoid, that the hate crimes bill won’t target thought crime, but only actual crime crime, (with bad thoughts attached.) They're wrong.
First the hate crimes bill means that any little scuffle can be magnified into a felony if someone can allege "hate." And it’s aso the start of the slippery slope to thought crime. (Anyone who doesn’t believe in the "slippery slope" should read this.
And that slippery slope leads to tyranny.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.