An addendum to yesterday’s “reactionary roundup“:
In the Radio Derb podcast linked to in the post, Mr. Derbyshire reported on the detention and deportation of several identitarian dissidents who had come to England to express their views at Hyde Park’s famous Speakers Corner. One was a young Austrian by the name of Martin Sellner.
Mr. Sellner having been booted out of the country (which, to be fair, any nation has the right to do, for any reason it likes), the English dissenter Tommy Robinson read Mr. Sellner’s speech in absentia. You can read it yourself, here. (The topic, aptly, is freedom of speech.)
For context, here are the latest “hate-crime” guidelines published by London’s Metropolitan Police. They include the following language (my emphasis):
A Hate Incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.
Not all hate incidents will amount to criminal offences, but it is equally important that these are reported and recorded by the police.
Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.
Are you getting this, readers? Here we are in London, the birthplace and nursery of the magnificent Western legal tradition, and now in 2018 the very heart of that tradition — objective truth, as supported by evidence — is, like an Aztec sacrifice, to be ripped from the still-living body of the English nation and offered to the gods. (The gods in this latter obeisance are no longer Xipe-Totec and Quetzalcoatl, but their modern replacements: Diversity, Equality, and Multiculturalism.)
It does seem, though there is scant comfort in it, that the authorities, wary of backlash, are proceeding with some caution. Apparently the original guidelines contained this language as well, since removed:
If someone does something that isn’t a criminal offence but the victim, or anyone else, believes it was motivated by prejudice or hate, we would class this as a ”˜hate incident’. Though what the perpetrator has done may not be against the law, their reasons for doing it are. This means it may be possible to charge them with an offence.
George Orwell had a name for this: thoughtcrime. He saw the future of what he called “Airstrip One” with terrifying accuracy, getting the dates wrong by a mere three decades.
Finally: all of this is in perfect conformance to another, higher Law: Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations.
7 Comments
It’s too bad that last part got taken out. It might have provided some basis for some kind of defense: the passage refers to the _perpetrator’s_ reasons or thoughts. Just maybe there’d be a way to use that in court (although the wording of all this stuff is so incoherent and bizarre there’s no way to know). Whereas what they have now doesn’t even require that the “perpetrator” had any particular thoughts or motivations; it only requires that some random other person thought the “perpetrator” thought something! In principle it’s even worse than what Orwell imagined.
Good point, Jacques. In this way it is another triumph of the movement toward absolute subjectivity.
At one level we have the requirement, as inconsistent as this may be, that we take other people’s subjective definitions of themselves as truth; Canada has enshrined this in its new pronoun law.
But it is quite another thing when one person’s subjective impression of what some other person is can affect the second person’s life with the force of law. We have this already in the question of abortion: if I attack a pregnant woman, resulting in the loss of a fetus she wished to carry to term, I can be charged with the murder of the unborn child — while if she chooses to, she can define the same fetus as a “clump of cells” to which we have no moral obligation, and end its life at her whim. So the moral status of the fetus, and very likely its life or death, depends solely upon the subjective ascription of personhood by its mother. It’s an awfully precarious “original position” to find oneself in as one enters the world. (I wonder what John Rawls would say about that!)
Now, with these guidelines from the U.K., we have a situation where one person’s criminal guilt or innocence depends entirely upon another person’s subjective experience of his speech. And it gets even worse: if the exchange happens in a crowd, your liberty hangs on the subjective experience of the most sensitive member of that crowd, even if he or she is only a casual witness!
This is insanity.
It’s amazing also that they never make any effort to explain how “prejudice” is related to “hate”. Under this law, if an old white lady crosses the street to avoid a mob of black gang-bangers staring her down, because she has a “prejudice” to the effect that such people tend to be dangerous, she must “hate” them and so her reasons for crossing the street might be illegal. (Or, for that matter, if she crossed the street because her destination was on the other side, but someone in the mob thought that she thought she was in danger, that too could be illegal.)
And, of course, if there was any attempt at objective thinking in the application of the law, the actions of police and politicians would be “hate crimes” against the native British people. Many of them must think that the authorities are motivated by “prejudice” and “hate” when they impose affirmative action laws, or when they refuse to close the borders to violent unassimilable aliens, or when they refuse to protect native British children from alien child molesters, etc. But of course that wouldn’t hold up in court; everyone understands that only some “prejudice” and “hate” is illegal.
” or when they refuse to protect native British children from alien child molesters, etc.” Where are the fathers, husbands, brothers etc of these molestation victims? At some basic level a man must be a man… goddam the law. It will be no surprise to hear that where I live, the life of a molester-no matter what he is- can be short lived if the law stands aside.
Valdimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident told of he and other prisoners finding a loophole. The Gulag had a rule that every complaint had to be looked into. Fine when one now and again was submitted. The guards could give an answer and maybe then “special treatment.”
When all the prisoners started filing complaints, all the time, it broke the system.
Every normal Londoner has to complain every day about anything they “perceive” as hate. Including any of the mayor’s statements.
Whitewall… What should the dad do when his community and the police will be against him, or at best indifferent? As I understand it there was a case where the father was arrested for inciting racial hatred, trying to get his daughter out of a Pakistani torture house. It would be one guy against a gang of criminals supported by the police. He might lose his family and freedom for doing anything.
Jacques- I would suggest that this is why we promote the formation of communities. To quote Harold Covington’s ‘The Brigade’: