Soft Totalitarianism Comes To Britain
And: Leaving UPF; Libs & Migration; Tipi Loschi; Martin Shaw; Evil AI
You will have heard about five police officers taking the comic actor Graham Linehan off the plane at Heathrow and into custody this week. Why? He said hurty words about transgenders on X. Well, I think the Hibernian lady is mad:
She’s right: this really is a form of totalitarianism. It’s all in Live Not By Lies (link to UK edition, as the Brits really, really need this book now). Here’s a passage from the first chapter, telling of how emigres from the Soviet bloc to the US were canaries on a coal mine:
The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?
It’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off. Many of us with aging parents are accustomed to having to talk them down from the ledge, so to speak, after a cable news program stoked their fear and anxiety about the world outside their front door. I assumed that this was probably the case with the elderly Czech woman.
But there was something about the tension in the doctor’s voice, and the fact that he felt compelled to reach out to a journalist he didn’t even know, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me to use his name if I wrote about him, that rattled me. His question became my question: What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?
During the next few years, I spoke with many men and women who had once lived under communism. I asked them what they thought of the old woman’s declaration. Did they also think that life in America is drifting toward some sort of totalitarianism?
They all said yes—often emphatically. They were usually surprised by my question because they consider Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject. In talking at length to some of the emigrants who found refuge in America, I discovered that they are genuinely angry that their fellow Americans don’t recognize what is happening.
What makes the emerging situation in the West similar to what they fled? After all, every society has rules and taboos and mechanisms to enforce them. What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.
Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.
People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.
It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.
“I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated,” says one professor, now living in the Midwest.
Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift a decade or so ago: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.
“I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”
It is happening in Britain today, worse than it ever did in America (thank you, First Amendment). The arrest of Graham Linehan shows that it is happening in the United Kingdom now to a degree we haven’t yet seen in the US. I hope Britons will avail themselves of the practical wisdom in the pages of Live Not By Lies (UK Edition), not only to better understand what is being done to them by their government and the elites, but how to resist it.
There are consequences for our submitting to the tyranny of trans and its allies. Matthew Hennessey of the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) writes about the Annunciation Catholic shooting, and how everybody has their own theory of what caused it, usually based on their prior political views. This part jumped out at me, because it strikes me as obviously true, but very difficult to assert:
The national mental-health crisis must of course be a part of the conversation. But if we can’t speak honestly about obvious realities, how can we ever have a useful conversation? Everyone will now search for the telltale sign that the Minneapolis killer was headed for a break with reality. It wasn’t long ago that a teenage boy who insisted he was actually a girl was understood to have already experienced a break with reality.
Can we at long last stop tiptoeing around the truth? This bumper crop of young people who claim to be transgender are profoundly disturbed, or else caught up in a dangerous social contagion, and need immediate treatment, not celebration and certainly not affirmation.
Robin Westman, the shooter, was clearly a mental case, and maybe even possessed. His trans identity, which he seemed to be dissatisfied with, did not make him shoot up that church. But I think it’s important to consider that his transness was one manifestation of his underlying mental instability. I believe that it is not coincidence that the first generation of kids raised entirely in the Internet era is also the generation in which transgenderism is exploding. There is something about the Internet and social media that creates unstable personalities.
Now Great Britain is catering to these unstable personalities to the extent that it is arresting and charging comedians for daring to criticize them. One wonders what the red line is for the people of that horrifically misgoverned country. Is there one? Or will they continue to submit to this woke totalitarianism? As an Anglophile, this both infuriates and grieves me. It cannot go on forever … can it?
