Recently, advocates for freedom of expression/speech in the UK, against the government's increasingly censoring "hate speech" laws - a completely subjective phrase - held a rally in London. Although liberal progressive news media called it "dangerous" (The Guardian was most ridiculously alarmist - Heaven knows, when those who don't toe the company line get uppity, world chaos might ensue!) and estimated the crowd from 2,000 to 4,000, many who actually attended put estimates at 10,000 to 60,000. Speakers were an international assembly of the cream of the anti-globalist crop: Tommy Robinson, Milo Yiannopolis, Lauren Southern, Anne Marie Waters, Raheem Kassam. Although one progressive liberal article cynically pointed out that the speakers, while decrying censorship, stood and said whatever they wanted to - it ignored (or was too ignorant to know) that several of these people have been arrested for just that: speaking. What follows is Jamie Horan's account, and some astute thoughts. - LC
-------
May 6th
was a hot day in London. Though I wasn’t
there personally, I could see it on the faces of throngs of British Citizens
gathering for what they called “A Day For Freedom.” A festive event in many
respects, but with an object no less important than the reclamation of the
dignity of free expression earned for them by their forebears, and taken from
them slowly but ceaselessly over their lifetimes.
"Freedom of
Speech" has only one meaning. In the
United States it is codified in writing as the first item in the Bill of
Rights. Our constitution would not have
been ratified without it. Its
main operating principle is that our government shall make no law which respects or restricts the following four
things:
- Religion
- Speech
- The Press
- Peaceable Assembly by people to redress grievances with their government.
For some
years now, I and I’m sure many like me in the states, have watched the
happenings in Europe, and particularly in England, with increasing alarm: the demographic slide into malaise; the
lame-brained reactionary social policies foisted upon people by those in power
(in many cases unelected); the
dangerously under-thought importation of the labor Europeans and Englanders alike failed to produce at home. We
watched as the governments of these nations moved in directions opposite their
polity and watched with particular disbelief as the polities bought the big
lie, that economic security is more important than individual liberty. As it
happens, that’s not just wrong, but
demonstrably and completely wrong.
But then, in June of 2016, Great Britain gave
us hope when she voted to leave the EU. It appeared that
once again, the She was rising to save Europe by example
and not rhetoric. Millions of Americans
were ecstatic at this outcome. Predictably though, the backlash began before
the vote was counted, as those who bought the lie, and those in power who
perpetrated the lie, sought by many means to soften or even erase the decision
compelling them to throw off the lie. They haven’t finished.
Many very
bright and thoughtful people continue to resist this effort by the political elite to mislead the people, and have made
their positions known over the years. They did so on major news networks and television shows, in debate halls
and on social media, and all too often in direct opposition to mobs of
indoctrinated pseudo-intellectual, virtue-signaling imbeciles, themselves
holding advanced degrees in stupidity of one type or another. As an
outsider I watched these bright people eviscerate these infants on countless
occasions, but knew and still know, that change happens on the ground and by
the people who live there. You see, a
listing ship is never righted by men in conning towers alone, but always it is
righted by those on and under her decks. I waited, I watched, I wrote what I could, noticing here and there
ground-level groups organizing around one type of flawed approach or another,
but who always aimed toward the same objective: the refusal to cede ground on the basic
human dignity enshrined in and carried forward by the freedom of expression.
Then it
happened. Some young guy from Luton Town,
later to be named as Tommy Robinson, decided to take the fight directly where
the fight needed to be: not in the
clouds where the educated debate the lofty ideals of democracy, tolerance and
free speech, but in alleys and on the streets of his little town where the
fight for his family’s future was much more visceral. He was fighting the real fight - the fight to
resist the tacit imposition of blasphemy law, a draconian system of control
long thought to be dead in the West, and which had risen from the bowels of the
massive importation of a poisonous ideology by the above-mentioned infants. I
watched as he was castigated and marginalized as a far-right racist extremist,
imprisoned, beaten, battered, conned and indulged - but unsurprisingly, not
silenced. He’s not glib, or posh, or privileged. He’s just a young man who won’t abide the encroachment
on the rights of his children in order to
appease a coddled and abhorrently violent subculture in his town.
On May 6th,
I saw this young man put together a gathering of what I could see as about
60,000 people. These people would remain standing for hours in the heat right
in front of Whitehall, the seat of British government. There were numerous speakers who’ve gained fame in social media circles,
and whom I’ve enjoyed for years, but my favorite was the first guy. His name, as I recall was “Inman.” He wasn’t posh or privileged or glib,
either. He was the guy who fights the
battles; the guy who rights the ship. He’s the guy the elected lean to when they’ve
got themselves into something they’re not equipped to handle, and wouldn’t know
where to start. Further, he’s the guy who knows there is no such thing as
“pooled sovereignty.” He knows that just
as a nation, an individual is either sovereign or he is not. He‘s an Englishman, and like Tommy Robinson, a
classic bull dog in every respect.
Standing
before him in the crowd were so many like him. They were of all stripes, men and women, old and young, gay and
straight, etc. who considered this event important enough to attend in person.
What they seemed to me to have in common was the need to physically demonstrate
that they’ve just had it - that they’re
done being told by their elected officials, their media, their police, and so
on, that their priorities are unimportant; that they and their progeny are no
longer needed for the future of Britain, you know the one that they and their
forebears built. They’ve had it with this new, less free Britain where their
concerns are subordinate to the priorities of a significant, but simple-minded minority who have
never built or had to defend anything at all. Had I been able, I would have
stood there with them with an American Flag in one hand and a Union Jack in the
other.
I tweeted
recently that “there are none more dangerous than a free people compelled to
silence.” I am bewildered that after alarming events - for many, in living memory - the political class
in Britain and elsewhere seem not to know this. The trend in British Government has been toward this incremental silencing, electronic surveillance and other Orwellian methods of censorship for so long now, these simpmletons convinced themselves
that it’s all okay. In fact, it’s not. No trade of liberty for security ever does what it is intended to do - namely, protect citizens - and always does what it was not intended to do - harm citizens.
It is
astonishing to me that the mere mention of a critical thought of one protected
group or another (of which are so many now) can land a British citizen in
court or even prison. Worse still is the tendency
toward hate crime law, a thought to me as an American so abominable as to be
akin to national suicide. So damning a trend has this become that now London is
arguably not British. This is not for its
cosmopolitan composition, but for the failure of its leadership locally, and its
parliament nationally, to stop their casual and incremental abandonment of the rights,
will and traditions of British citizens. What
this group did on Sunday and will undoubtedly continue to do, was to let their elected
officials know that they’re just there to hold a place for them; they are there to move the ball for them - make what is already there better for them, and to my mind they
did that. One after another, the Youtube
stars and the bulldogs alike let the tepid houses of Parliament and the prime
minister know that their Britain still is Great Britain, and they’re not going
to see it taken from them.
For Tommy, I
recommend he take the next rally to Buckingham. It is, after all, Her Majesty’s government. For the elected, I recommend what they
themselves like to call Active Listening, because although this group numbered in
the thousands, they exist in the millions, - and frankly, the elected are running out of time.
** Although Great Britain previously held law that protected the right to speak out against specific things like religions, this coding was abrogated by its adoption in 1998 of the European Convention's Article 10 into the domestic Human Rights Act, which contains numerous exceptions to free expression - many inherently vulnerable to a changing subjective interpretation. As of 2017, two major news outlets in the UK said that an average of nine persons per day were being arrested for violations of the law through online speech, and that of these five on average were convicted. Big Brother has at last come to Great Britain.