If you’re wondering why I’ve been quiet for five days, it might be something to do with living in a mass surveillance state where every word you write can land you in jail. Just typing out something like “genocide is wrong” can get you put on a watch list. I think I can therefore be forgiven for taking a step back to gather myself. The last thing I need is police dragging my kids into the street at dawn while my neighbours gawp and our personal possessions are stolen so the government can peer into every aspect of our personal lives. This is Britain in 2024, folks.
After police eased their draconian bail restrictions on Sarah Wilkinson, I’d assumed someone had a word and they were rowing back their authoritarianism, but when they targeted Asa Winstanley, I realised this was naive. Police were simply adjusting their strategy so they didn’t leave themselves open to as much criticism.
With Asa, police were gentler and did not arrest him, they just stole the possessions he needs to work and probably scared the shit out of him. I guess you could call this “moderate authoritarianism”. Remember, the other party would have done authoritarianism worse…
Cardinal Richelieu once famously said: “Give me six lines written by the most honourable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” Apparently, this is the tactic counter-terrorism police are adopting to stop criticism of Israel. You know the internet meme about how you can type out the most clearly worded statement and someone will argue you mean the opposite? Those trolls are working for UK police and trying to invert anything we write so they can harass us.
A call for peace can be portrayed as a call for terrorism if you take a bad faith interpretation. A demand for a ceasefire is suddenly, “Oh, you want Hamas to be rewarded for October 7th and go around drinking the blood of children and throwing gays off roofs?” No, idiot, I want peace! That’s why I used the word “peace”. You’re the ones who keep justifying genocide. We want the violence to stop!
Given the level of bad faith and the abuses of power, I’ve taken the drastic step of unpublishing almost every article I’ve ever written. I will gradually republish them, if and when this madness stops. Going forward, I will be ensuring no word I write can be misinterpreted, so prepare for a patronising level of clarification. I’m going to talk to you like you’re five.
Expect ridiculous statements like, “Just because I don’t want Palestinian children to be melted in their tents does not mean I want anyone to rape Israeli women and behead their babies”. It’s so fucking stupid, but we deal with such accusations on social media and our weirdo accusers have been recruited by police.
Of course, we won’t be able to keep the establishment at bay forever. When one strategy stops working, they will find another, whether that be false accusations of anti-Semitism or demands for more stringent social media censorship or something I’ve not thought of. If you think you have free speech, you’ve not tried to use it in a meaningful way. Give it a try and you will quickly discover what a minefield it is.
When a genocide is taking place, the people who should get the benefit of the doubt are the ones who oppose the genocide, not the ones who support it, but this country is so disgustingly upside-down. Counter-terrorism police will never visit someone at dawn for lavishing praise on the genocidal IDF.
One day these fascists are going to be asked by their grandkids what they did during the Gaza holocaust and they will have to say, “Well, it was my job to round up people who spoke out against the genocide and pretend they were terrorists to protect the people who were committing the genocide.”
I would suggest they would feel shame, however, we are so rapidly accelerating towards totalitarianism, this sort of thing might soon be normal. Genocide and censorship could be accepted parts of life that we’re powerless to stop. We have no choice but to use whatever speech we have left while we can. Given the trend towards censorship across the west, this could be our last chance to stop the madness.
Israel is talking of putting Palestinians into biometric concentrations camps where every aspect of their lives is monitored. Tony Blair would love nothing more than to introduce biometric IDs in the UK. Klaus Schwab would masturbate over the idea, if that was a thing he could physically do. The authorities want to control our opinions, and stop us hearing alternative views, and that is the very definition of totalitarianism.
I just had two posts removed from Mastodon for “holocaust inversion” by people who clearly don’t know what inversion means. One post was a quote from holocaust survivor Gabor Maté who said of the Gaza genocide, “It’s like watching Auschwitz on TikTok”.
Maté lost family members in Auschwitz and endured incredible childhood trauma. Today, he is a specialist in childhood trauma who has been highlighting what Palestinian children are going through. When my Mastodon instance accused me of holocaust inversion, they accused this holocaust survivor too. It’s truly despicable.
The words “never again” are supposed to mean something, but when I showed side-by-side images of the holocaust of the Jews and the holocaust of the Palestinians, I was again accused of holocaust inversion. Clearly, never again is supposed to mean, “Ignore it, next time you see it happening”.
Are you understanding why censorship is so dangerous yet? History has taught us the wrong lessons and we’re falling into the same traps. The only way to educate people is to reach them. If we can’t speak out, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes forever.
One thing everyone needs to understand is that holocausts are not confined to Nazis. Literally every nation on earth is capable of genocide when certain conditions arise. The real enemy of humanity is obedience because obedience makes atrocities possible.
George Carlin once said: “The obedient always see themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly”. Today, the virtuous sensibles have decided censorship is sensible, unaware that by accepting an ever-narrowing Overton window, they will become victims of censorship themselves. They are currently raging that Elon Musk is trying to influence the US election. They feel something must be done to censor social media to stop the likes of Musk. Strangely, they weren’t going after Murdoch when he backed their choice of Sir Keir Starmer. Then it was fine for a billionaire to tell people how to vote, but now it’s bad because a billionaire is backing the wrong choice.
I happen to agree it’s worrying that a single billionaire can wield so much influence, but the solution is not to target the guy you currently dislike. It’s certainly not to turn Twitter into Facebook where literally 50% of political articles from non-mainstream sources are taken down. The solution is to democratise all forms of media and put ownership in the hands of workers. Some of us have had solutions for the longest time and been called crazy by those who would swap one set of problems for another.
For all Twitter’s faults under Musk, it is a damn sight better for anyone criticising their government than Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. Yet those who criticise Musk, sometimes legitimately, tend to have nothing to say about censorship on other platforms. This shows you they are not acting in good faith. It shows they do not value free speech.
Meta has just appointed a former adviser to Netanyahu to censor posts that “make Jews feel unsafe” which is code for “anything that exposes Israel’s war crimes”. Imagine the uproar if a Palestinian was appointed to censor pro-Israel content, but it’s fine for genocide supporters to censor anti-genocide content.
Our social media platforms are being turned into Radio Rwanda and the very last thing we should do is greenlight the censorship of those who counter the propaganda. We should be enshrining free speech protections in law, especially for social media users, bloggers and independent journalists. If we fall for the bullshit and greenlight online censorship now, we might never get our free speech back. Imagine how bad the next genocide will get if we have no way of reporting about it…The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: The lesson we learnt from "never again" was to do censorship during genocide
.. but I'm not sure who's written this piece. It's very good.
It doesn't really matter who has written this piece. Censorship seems likely to be be a very good reason not to bluntly reveal his/her identity. What matters is that it is an excellent analysis. This particular one is best so far imo.
Hmmmm? I think it does matter. Perhaps he/she has written other articles and pieces worth looking out for. A name on an opinion brings a degree of authenticity, like a signature on a painting. Anyway, MHO. If something's worth saying, you say it out loud. I'd ban nom de plumes and anonymous contributions to everything on the internet, might stop some of the sheer nastiness if it was going to be homed to you.
on October 23, 2024, 7:45 pm