Turning your children into Stasi spies
THE invention of ‘hate crime’ has turned this into a society where the police patrol our minds and opinions. When exactly did we start to slither down such a steep and frightening slope? Whose fault is it? It will end with something very like the East German Stasi, who were nothing like as nice as their portrayal in the film The Lives Of Others.
Now, tucked away on page 481 of a 544page ‘consultation document’ from the highly influential Law Commission, is a suggestion that what we say in our own homes should in future be prosecuted. It is many years since our homes have been our castles, but this is a totalitarian idea, especially now that almost anything can be recorded.
You might think that you never say anything at home that could get you into trouble. But the rapidly tightening speech codes of our society grow narrower every day.
Nobody speaks as freely now as they did 20 years ago. Are you sure that your opinions, once normal, will not one day become a crime? I expect that expressing doubts about the CO2 explanation of global warming will become a criminal offence in my lifetime, and if you doubt it, look around you.
The other really nasty thing about this (apart from the opportunities for blackmail) is that your children could end up accidentally denouncing you, by a chance remark at school picked up by a zealot teacher and reported to the authorities. I would once have urged you to campaign against this. But with the sort of Government we now have, I say, prepare for it to happen.
DELUSIONS make you see things, and in Vienna they made almost everyone see double on Monday, when a madman was on the loose, killing people. First reports insisted there was more than one gunman. They often do. It also happened in the mosque shootings in New Zealand last year, because police and the media have it in their heads that such attacks must be organised and political.
Some are, but most are not. I will be lied about and accused of excusing Islamist terror when I say it, as I so often am. But most of these attacks are by crazed individuals sent insane by marijuana, a terrible drug with great PR. We’d know if we looked. But we want to think they are something else.