IN the UK and throughout Europe we face three huge threats to our ability to speak freely: growing censorship, intrusive surveillance and militant Islam that thrives in this environment.
Censorship is on many people’s radars but surveillance and Islam, which in turn depend on a culture of political censorship, are also serious threats to our freedoms which are not getting the attention they need.
Censorship, the enemy of free speech and privacy is the means to control every area of our lives. Europe and the UK have fallen into a new era of totalitarianism, characterised by the words that cannot be uttered under the law. Hate speech, censorship’s emissary, is a concept forced on us under two guises, presented as ‘ideals’:
● Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
● Multiculturalism
They in turn are the latest manifestations of the cultural Marxism which has long since taken hold of our institutions and removed truth as the standard and replaced it with moral relativism and subjective falsities. The right to offend is no longer a right but a threat to the new world order. Diktats are to be followed and not questioned or discussed.
Just look at the covid tyranny. Divide and conquer was used to full effect. Them and us. The vaxxed and the unvaxxed. Fear is a powerful motivator. And people are sheep-like. They want to be part of the crowd. Not to be different; to be liked not disapproved of. In the USA the rise of MAGA has given new confidence and boldness to ordinary Americans, and in fact citizens across the world, to speak up and challenge the regime consensus.
We also see how blind obedience is rewarded with a better social credit score. Dissent can kill everything that is taken for granted as well as a career or your capacity to earn money. And this blends into surveillance.
Frank Gaffney, the American Defence Policy analyst, has been sounding the alarm on this for years: on the threat we all face from the Chinese Communist Party (and more recently from the WHO). Diversity of views and privately owned media were eliminated in China in 1949 when the CCP took control and brought freedom of thought to a complete end. Western governments have longed for this level of control of their citizens. And technology has given it to them. It has given governments and quasi governmental organisations the power to monitor and report as never before in society. Setting up a reporting group of informers to feed a Ministry of State Security by spying on neighbours and family (as happened in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain) is no longer needed. Our phones do this automatically and they will be part of our downfall. So while we continue to go through the motions of democracy, the dice are already set and the odds are not in our favour.
Take a headline in the Wall Street Journal: ‘Zuckerberg’s Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI. Meta’s CEO is promoting a future where artificial intelligence is increasingly intertwined with people’s lives.’Meta will cure loneliness by providing AI chat bots as friends, he promises.
It is a horrifying future vision for humanity. Our new AI friends will not only keep an eye on us (surveillance) but I guarantee you they will also report back to Facebook if we say anything problematic and black-mark us, ban or deplatform us (censorship). Just as we have seen with Alexa or OK Google, everything is recorded. ‘For our safety’ of course. Duplicitous ‘newspeak’ is no longer a concept in a novel written by George Orwell 75 years ago. It is government policy and an entrenched part of the political culture.
The latest and most brutal clampdown on freedom of speech came last summer when the new far-left government responded to an uprising against mass immigration which followed the barbaric murder of three small girls by a Islamist. It was swiftly crushed in echoes of the totalitarian regimes we fought in the past.
What was unique to the UK was the sheer blatancy of Keir Starmer’s vengeance. It stands as a warning to all Americans. The censorship and control rolled out in the UK is being adapted across Europe. President Trump has a battle on his hands to hold back the tide of Western governments controlling what speech and thoughts are allowed to exist. Take the case of Dr Robert Malone. He was listed as one of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ by a quasi governmental organisation, Centre for Combating Digital Hate, based in the UK.
Misinformation and disinformation, terms that suddenly appeared, are the means used by the Government, its agencies (chief of which is Ofcom) and the social media tech companies nominally to keep us all ‘safe’ from ‘hate speech’ and ‘wrong thinking’. In fact they are to set confines over what we can communicate. Government has become the chief arbitrator of truth. Not the Bible but our Government. The abandonment of truth that censorship is has created the vacuum in which Islam has flourished, not just in the UK but across Europe.
In the Bible, John 18 describes Jesus’s trial with Pontius Pilate which arrives at one of the most important questions for our age now.
37 ‘You are a king, then!’ said Pilate.
Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’
38 ‘Truth. What is truth?’ retorted Pilate.
What is Truth? Previous generations have been able to answer this. Jesus, who is Truth, has been the foundation for our societies and culture across Western civilisation. But now instead of knowing what truth, absolute truth, is, ‘truth’ has collapsed into meaningless and dangerous subjectivity. Your truth may be different from my truth.
It is this rejection of moral absolutes which has opened the door to governments defining what is right or wrong through censorship and criminalisation, and allowed a confident and aggressive ideology called Islam to flourish. In fact my Prime Minister Two-Tier Keir remained confused about what a woman was until the UK Supreme Court ruled a woman is someone who was born female and a man is someone who is born male. We did not need a Supreme Court ruling for that piece of truth. All we needed was Genesis 1 and 2.
Part 2 follows tomorrow and focuses on the rise of hate crime
Peter is the co-founder and host of the Hearts of Oak podcast http://x.com/HeartsofOakUK, a populist free speech alliance that has three shows a week with an audience of 120,000 per show and now streams on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom.
