We are approaching a decisive moment. David Cameron nervously described Leveson’s proposals to ‘regulate’ the British press as ‘crossing the Rubicon’ but as Paul Goodman says in the linked article his government is about to do it anyway. If people accept that government has a role in controlling commercial media (and ‘regulate’ is merely a statist euphemism for ‘control’), then we are a blink away from wider controls. Already the daily fake ‘scandals’ about ‘Twittter trolls’ and ‘Facebook bullies’ are setting the scene.
Alea iacta est for freedom of thought in Britain. It seems the police are already more interested in what we say than what we do. Barely a day goes by without some schmuck on Twitter being interrogated by the police and it’s already a worse crime to beat up or kill someone if thinking certain thoughts at the time.
The Left have been making ‘social’ excuses for non thought-crime for generations. Our judges, educated in our solidly left-wing universities, now routinely spout sociological clap-trap while handing out derisory sentences. The notion of personal responsibility is dead. In a telling moment for me an academic at a conference last year (he claimed not to be a Marxist, but admitted most of his colleagues were) told me that my personal achievements were ‘pure luck’ and that I was not morally entitled to the proceeds.
It’s the flip side of the same coin. The evil that criminals do is ‘society’s fault’ and the state must address not their conduct, but the ‘social problems’ that ’cause’ it. The success of honest citizens however is to the state’s credit and it is entitled to the proceeds. Socialism, despite the abject failure of the greatest political experiment in history, with more than half of humanity ruled by Socialists in the last century, is back. Watch out, because this time the Leftists have learned guile.
The leader of HM Opposition feels it aids his electoral cause to use ‘the S word’ openly and to dog-whistle even worse by defending the reputation of his proudly-Marxist father. Ironically, given the Left’s fixation on ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ Socialism is a doctrine based on hatred; class-hatred and envy-driven hatred of success. It should provoke exactly the same revulsion as its cousin; race-hate-based National Socialism. That it doesn’t is because the Left has infiltrated our education system and our state broadcaster (tell me again why a free society needs one of those) so successfully. Now it’s coming for the rest of us.
The consequence will be just as it was in the Soviet Union. The more talented or industrious will either contribute less for lack of incentive, or will become the criminals these idiots already think they are. This phenomenon was illustrated by two Communist-era proverbs I learned in my years in Poland;
“Standing up or lying down, it’s a zloty an hour” and “You are stealing from your family if you’re not stealing from the State.”
Though I am sure the Labour Party will get most of the extra votes when we finally obey the ECHR order to restore the ballot to prisoners, that’s not what the Left is up to. Nor are they claiming the credit for business-peoples’ work just to damage our self-esteem. They are establishing as a ‘given’ in all political thought and policy-making the Marxist notion that individuals are mere flotsam on the tides of historical inevitability. They can only treat us as eggs to be callously cracked in their great steaming omelette of statism if they can convince themselves that we are trivial; that what we think, say and do and the choices we make don’t matter. In short, that we are nothing in their great scheme of things.
To achieve the kind of sociopathic vileness that led their hero Hobsbawm (close family friend of the Millibands) to believe that twenty million deaths under Soviet rule would have been justified had the proposed communist utopia been created, or that it was sensible to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel (there’s no anti-semite to rival a Marxist Jew) you need to reduce humans to ciphers. And to convince men and women that this is acceptable; that they really are mere pawns in a game that matters far more than the sacrifices made of them, you need to control their thoughts. It is no coincidence that the Left cannot abide the expression of non-Left views. It is not for nothing that they actively seek to make people fearful of non-Left thoughts. It is a Marxist necessity.
If our free will is irrelevant, our achievements mere luck and our wickedness attributable to our circumstances, then they are fully justified in using the immense power of the state to shape ‘social forces’, regardless of the human cost.
It is a short step from ‘hate speech’ to ‘thought crime’ and it’s about to be taken. ‘Regulation’ of the press is just another brick in the wall.
The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
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