First They Came For The Words

Control of words doesn’t just inhibit speech, it inhibits imagination, and thought itself. The content which is approved can actually be foul, because morals and decency don’t come into it. It is about control, and the eradication of any whose speech indicates that they are not afraid.

And already, just by writing that paragraph, I know I will have triggered those who think that the elimination of differing views is a moral duty as well as a personal pleasure.

I am writing in the week in which presenter Piers Morgan was vindicated by Ofcom, the independent broadcasting standards body, for daring to disagree with Meghan Markle.
Over fifty thousand people had bayed for his blood for this ‘crime’ – including Markle herself, who used her position to personally contact Morgan’s employers and demand that he be fired.

Ofcom described as “chilling” the notion that any public figure should be considered above criticism, or that any point of view should be the only point of view permitted.

It is indeed chilling, but it is the norm now, and, heart-warming as it is that Ofcom support free debate, I am equally chillingly certain that Markle, and her witch-hunters, will, as I write, be busying themselves in finding ‘inappropriate’ Tweets, or off-the-cuff comments made in the hearing of an informer, to unleash screeching hysteria upon, and fire all of those who reached this decision.
That, too, is now the norm. 

It was so refreshing to see a chink of light in the silent darkness, that I decided to investigate other episodes of Piers Morgan speaking out. 
After all, since he left his job – refusing to make a grovelling apology for having a personal opinion – figures for the show he dominated have plummeted to an embarrassing, all-time low. 
Clearly, by being willing to speak freely, he spoke for millions – even those who didn’t agree with him.

I found dozens, but I will post just three at the bottom of this piece, and if you want to see what witch-hunters look like in the 21st century, then you need look no further than these. 

What stays with me most, after watching them, is the exchange between two women, one insisting that certain words, people and phrases are not now necessary.

Really? Says who? And how far does she extend this, as she basks in the satisfaction of having ruined a blameless life? Who else, and what else, may become “unnecessary” in her judgement?
What’s more, she bizarrely assumes that “we all agree” she is right – which is positively psychopathic.

The other began by defending free speech, but suddenly realised that because she had spoken out, the witch-hunt against her would commence unless she was suitably conciliatory. There was real fear in her face. The gimlet-eyed witch-hunter was clearly planning to release the hounds on her, and she knew it.

I am also writing in a week in which laughter, as well as words, has taken a hit.  76 year old Roy Chubby Brown has been banned from performing in Sheffield, despite tickets selling out.

I don’t happen to find Brown funny – but that is not the point.  Performers should not be cancelled by either witch-hunt or edict.

Even more chilling is the case of Janey Godley, the Scottish comedian who had signed up to take part in the Scottish campaign to encourage the wearing of masks, and lateral flow Covid testing, and had arranged to give her fee to a children’s charity – but has now been publicly shamed and stripped from the campaign, due to someone having the time and inclination to dig up some “offensive” Tweets from over a decade ago.

At least, they are stated to be offensive, but since nobody will actually show what they contain, who knows whether they actually are? 

Godley made her name parodying SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, a woman who has now instituted prison-sentences of up to seven years for people saying “offensive” things in their own homes, so she probably has a sense of humour – and sense of personal power – much akin to those of Stalin.

What really made my blood run cold in this case, was the awful, self-abasing apology which Godley made, which was along the lines of the Nazi show-trials adjudicated by Roland Friesler (Google him if you want nightmares) – the final, public degradation before the “offender” was executed anyway.

Who is it, who can be bothered to devote themselves to wiping out any opinion other than their own? I will call them Woke, because that is what everyone who is not them, calls them. 

They hold power of speech or silence over us all, although judging by the truth of the phrase “go woke, go broke”, they are in direct opposition to the beliefs of the vast majority of us.  They demand to be the future, although they resemble, in their tyrannical elitism, a Medieval monarch.

These are people, this is an ethos, which wants its opponents to die: socially, financially, mentally, emotionally, preferably physically, since that is often the result of being robbed of everything else. 
For such people, and such an ethos, to in any way claim the moral high-ground, is a surreal distortion of truth.

The truth is that there are as many opinions as there are people, but Woke has nothing to do with Truth.

What we are seeing now, is fascism – being practiced by those who accuse any who oppose them, of that very thing. 

A free speaker, thinker, writer, artist, is not “fascist” as long has he or she permits others to be free. Anyone who denies the rights of others to freedom is fascist, because fascism is defined by its authoritarian suppression of opposition.

No matter which side of the political fence someone claims to be, if they practice the authoritarian suppression of opposition, they bear the hall-mark of fascism. (For the record, those who studied history before it was Woke-ified know that both Hitler, and Mussolini, described themselves as ‘socialist’.)

The trouble is, history has also been cancelled, seeing famous, beloved historians such as Starky and Oliver driven beyond the Woke Wall because an interest in history is ‘problematic’. 
History involves a forensic examination of the past, and who knows what the historian might unearth?

One thing which might be ‘problematic’, is excavating the Enlightenment, which can be defined by the phrase “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This phrase was never actually uttered by philosophe Voltaire, but was the gist of his writing, for which he was imprisoned and persecuted.
The elite of his day, too, found free speech “offensive”.

Examining the fifty year, astoundingly expensive British campaign against slavery, which involved loss of British lives, and taking out loans which we were repaying until 2014, would also knock the Woke narrative for six.

Naturally, as well as the risk of revealing the good intentions and achievements of people who the Woke want to erase, and therefore inevitably damaging the narrative of anti-European-anti-American-anti-Anglosphere-anti-white hatred which is a prerequisite of being Woke,  an examination of more recent history would certainly expose what happens when people are categorised according to race and sexuality, a practice which is a Woke obsession.

Far from agreeing with Martin Luther King that civilised humans should value the content of a character rather than the colour of a skin, the Woke practically hold people up to a Dulux colour-chart to assess their worth.
Complete any form now, and you will find that someone, somewhere, will want on record your race, religion, and sexuality.

Why? There have previously been only three ‘regimes’ under which these things were considered valid for registration – Nazi-occupied Europe, Apartheid South Africa, and the pre-Civil Rights southern states of America.

And now – to what should be our eternal shame: Woke Britain.

In a civilised, tolerant society, race is irrelevant, religion is free, sexuality is personal. But to the Woke, categorising human beings is of vital importance for the manipulation of society, robbing people of their common humanity and shared values, a practice of creating divisions rather than encouraging the unity Woke pretend to espouse.

Woke like to describe themselves as Left Wing, but they bear no relation to the old Labour Party of which I, and four generations of my family, were members.

Woke like to say that the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s were Right Wing, when in fact the word “Nazi” is an abbreviation of the name of Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party – and Mussolini began his career as a school-teacher, who wrote for a Socialist newspaper.
It was the free-thinkers of the Socialist camp who were eradicated by the fascists – just as they are now, by the Woke.

Woke like to deny their fascism, by claiming that libertarianism – the usual position of what today describes itself as Right Wing – is fascism.

In fact, a Libertarian is defined as “an advocate or supporter of civil liberties and of a political philosophy that advocates only minimal state intervention in the free market and the private lives of citizens,” whereas fascists practiced the categorisation of individuals according to race and sexuality, along with absolute social control, and the authoritarian suppression of alternative viewpoints.

Ring any Woke bells?

I doubt Orwell’s 1984 would find a publisher now, but the lack of self-awareness among the Woke is so astonishing, that I equally doubt that they ever recognise their behaviour in the line “the truth was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

However, each of us who has been vilified for defying the Woke, fully understands this, from the same author: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

The publishing industry itself, which once fought to publish forbidden books, is now Woke; numerous authors who have been well-established for years, have now had to self-publish because some needle-nosed little dictator detected a modicum of rebellion and harassed their publisher.

I find that I am less and less interested in reading a newly traditionally-published novel, because I know it will have passed the Woke-o-meter, and will therefore be as compliant with Woke fascism as those who performed in the propaganda-laden historical dramas of Josef Goebbels. 

On this blog, I often reminisce about my family, and I realise that, although they were thoroughly decent people, these days they would be hounded, silenced and vilified simply for being themselves. 

They were white, working-class, old-school Labour-voters, intelligent, fairly well-read, law-abiding, patriotic, proud of their achievements, tolerant, good-humoured and colour-blind.  They were people who others turned to in a crisis, and they thought that kindness, courage, common-sense and stoicism were virtues.  They were strangers to self-pity and believed in counting their blessings. 

They thought, quite rightly, that everyone was entitled to their say and anyone who bossed others around was a know-all and an interfering busy-body. 
They believed that Social Justice involved everyone having a vote, and ensuring that there were affordable homes, secure jobs, free health-care, and a good education for every child, provided by teachers who kept to their subject, and kept their politics to themselves.

They would have thought that a teacher who so much as considered a child’s sexuality, was a pervert. And they would have thought that people who spend their life inventing difficulties, defining categories, and imagining grievances, have too much time on their hands, and should go and do something useful. 

They were everything Woke want to eradicate and, I have tears in my eyes as I write this, I find, more and more, that I am glad they didn’t live to see what has been done to the world they thought they had made safe and free for their grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Don’t think you will ever be Woke enough, if you are capable of any independent thought whatsoever.  It is impossible, because the boundaries of what offends depend on the whim of the Woke elite.

This is why even JK Rowling – not only vastly wealthy and famous, but previously considered vastly Woke herself – has had death threats, and why her publisher has received hysterical demands to drop her from their lists. 

J K Rowling didn’t curtail her imagination sufficiently.  The world’s most successful living author, who has toed the line at all times, dared to write without consulting the very latest diktat.

The irony is that in that regard, J K Rowling now falls into the same category as Tommy Robinson, who also receives death threats and shrieking demands for the removal of his books from Amazon. 
Freedom is freedom, and those who are robbing the world of words, in order to reshape thought in their own image, make no distinction between the books they wish to burn.

What matters to them, is that they control words, thoughts, imagination, the very heart and soul of an individual, without which, the individual ceases to exist, becoming as meaningful as a stuffed toy which squawks all the right phrases repetitively when its string is pulled.  

If you love words, if you love to immerse yourself in a book, then you need to defend even those words and books you dislike, because their very existence, out there in the big, wide world, is a declaration of your own right to be whoever you are.

Winston Churchill – voted Greatest Briton, and one who Woke definitely want to erase – said “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” And so it is each time you try to please the Woke by whittling away at your choice of words, hand-cuffing your mind and soul, little by little, in order to avoid being their target.

You are never safe from the Woke, if you actually exist.  Sooner or later, you will put a foot wrong: laugh at a joke which contains a forbidden word, or like the wrong comment, or post a news article from the wrong source.

Sooner or later, you will not raise your arm high enough, not scream hatred of freedom loud enough, not label yourself and others correctly, not be obsessed enough with the latest authorised script.

The Woke are watching.

If they can come for J K Rowling, they are definitely coming for you.

(1484) Are We Too Easily Offended? | Good Morning Britain – YouTube
(1484) Piers Loses It Over Sexist ‘Handbags’ Comment Debate | Good Morning Britain – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDI6j0pH87k

https://mandybaldwinwriterblog.wordpress.com/