by Giulio Meotti
In 1984, Soviet dissident Gunnars Astra was sentenced to twelve years in prison in the USSR for possessing a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” and for secretly translating it. In our 2024, it is difficult to grasp the paradoxes of a new 1984. A clear mind and intellectual courage are needed.
We long for the days when the expression “politically correct police” was just an ironic quip by Philip Roth, not a literal description of what is happening in the West.
It was six o’clock on Sunday morning, when Allison Pearson found herself on her doorstep, in her dressing gown and slippers, facing two police officers.
The Telegraph journalist was facing a “Kafkaesque” police investigation for having “fomented racial hatred” in a social media post last year. Pearson, an award-winning writer and excellent much-read columnist for the English newspaper, had two police officers arrive at her home to tell her that she was under investigation for a post on X (formerly Twitter).
When Pearson asked what she had said that deserved the police attention, the officer said he was not allowed to reveal it. The officer also refused to reveal the name of her accuser. “It’s not the accuser,” the officer said, looking down at his notes. “They are called victims.”
Maybe “Big Ben has fallen” and we didn’t realize it.
Three police officers assigned to investigate a journalist for a post on social media? Something is rotten in the country called England.
That’s all it takes in George Orwell’s country for the police to knock on your door.
Six months ago, Allison Pearson warned on TV about the “Islamisation of our country”.
The repression of the few who still dare to speak out about the ongoing disintegration reminds me of the treatment the cultural establishment reserved for anti-Soviet writers in the 1950s.
Reading Allison Pearson made me understand the point of all those courses on “Islamophobia” that the British police are subjecting themselves to. Last February it emerged that many of these thought control courses are run by Jihadists.
British police websites have just advertised “November is Islamophobia Awareness Month.”
British police have even decided to investigate a banner by Newcastle fans protesting the Saudi takeover of the club. It shows a man in Saudi attire brandishing a bloody sword and about to decapitate a magpie, while fans chant in the background: “We’ve got our club back.” The banner then lists the crimes that the Saudi regime is accused of by all human rights groups: terrorism, beheadings, violations of civil rights, murder, censorship and persecution.
“This is appalling,” said Boris Johnson. “How can Starmer’s Britain lecture other countries about free speech when an innocent journalist is knocked on the door for a tweet? Our police are forced to behave like a woke Securitate – and this must stop.” The Securitate was the secret police of Ceausescu’s Romania.
10 Downing Street had to intervene in the Pearson affair.
If it’s not an ideological regime, it’s very close. And the repression says they’re afraid of the truth. And that Musk wasn’t entirely wrong when he coined a nickname for Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer: “Two Tier Keir”.
England is the same country where the authorities (prime minister, judges, police, ministers) hid from the public for four months that a child killer was an Al Qaeda terrorist who manufactured chemical weapons.
This is the same country where Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell directed police to investigate Douglas Murray’s book, “The Strange Death of Europe”.
This is the same country where a protester carrying a “Hamas is terrorist” banner was arrested multiple times in London for holding up the anti-Islamic fundamentalist sign as pro-Palestinian Arab protesters walked past him.
This is the same country where a teacher had to change his house and name after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in a civics lesson.
Pearson risks a trial like Christoph Biró, editor-in-chief of the best-selling Austrian daily, the Kronen Zeitung, who wrote an article accusing “young Syrian men with a high level of testosterone, who carried out very aggressive sexual assaults” (even before the sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Hamburg and other cities). The Graz prosecutor’s office has charged Biró with “incitement to hatred.”
Britain’s experiment in controlling “hate” has become both farcical and authoritarian.
In Spain, a priest who criticized Islam was investigated for “hate crimes.”
German Islam critic Michael Stürzenberger was sentenced to six months in prison for “incitement to hatred.” He criticized political Islam and its “atrocities.” Then an Islamist tried to kill him in a Mannheim square.
Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot spent a night in jail. The police confiscated his computer and summoned him to the prosecutors. Investigated for “incitement to hatred.” Because in his drawings he mocked Islam.
The late philosopher Roger Scruton was fired by a government committee before he died for saying that the word “Islamophobia” was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even the winner of the English Booker Prize, Shehan Karunatilaka, has censored himself on Islam. “I had written a story about a radicalized teenager for a collection I was preparing and my wife suggested I delete it. It only takes one person to be offended and suddenly you’re an Islamophobic writer.” And when he heard about the attack in New York against Rushdie, he had no doubts: “My wife said, ‘You have two small children, take that story out.’”
Love is hate. Winston Smith. Big Brother. 1984. Ministry of Truth. It all sounds very, far too, current.
“Take that story out,” the Western surrender party keeps telling us.