THE TYRANNY OF WOKE

AS PART of the fightback against today’s increasingly pervasive and extreme culture of political correctness, we have been running a series that challenges this intolerant mindset. Here, PETER HITCHENS says he fears that anyone who dissents from the new orthodoxy will be visited by the Thought Police…

IT WAS a bright, cold day in Oxford and everywhere I looked, rainbow flags flapped and fluttered in the sharp wind. They flew from the ancient colleges along the High Street. They flew from the Town Hall. And what they said to me was ‘Your side has lost. There is nothing you can do about it.’ As write this, I know that an apprentice Thought Police officer will certainly copy and store my words, to use them against me at some point in the future.

The mere act of suggesting that there is anything oppressive about these banners will ensure that I am convicted of ‘homomum phobia’. Those who condemn me will not be even slightly interested in what I actually think.

It is startling to recall walking down the same street more than 50 years ago, when nobody had ever thought of rainbow flags and this was still a free country.

At that time, just as I am now, I was strongly in favour of maxitolerance towards homosexuals, and thought it ludicrous and wicked that only a few years before, they were being arrested and prosecuted for actions that were wholly private.

But in the years that followed, a strange thing happened.

Tolerance, which still seems to me to be the best way of coping with our many differences, was no longer enough. In fact, it became positively bad. Nothing short of total acceptance of the new thinking would do.

A huge change in sexual morality of all kinds was cleverly presented as mainly being the liberation of homosexuals from persecution. In truth, it had many other aspects, to do with abortion, stable marriage, fatherless families and other changes which mostly affected defenceless children. But conservatives who had doubts about any of it could be – and were – instantly dismissed as crude bigots who were motivated largely by a hatred of homosexuals.

No doubt, some of them were, just as some opponents of mass immigration are racial bigots.

But most of them, including me, were not bigoted at all. The point was, it no longer mattered. While you were explaining, you were losing the argument. So better to leave it.

Privately, I still believe that my position is thoughtful and civilised. Publicly, I know it is now futile, and worse than futile, to defend it, so I have reluctantly chosen silence.

But even to explain how my freedom is limited by the flying of these flags is to risk being sniffed out by zealous heresy detectors, and that is enough.

ALREADY, to my certain knowledge, cold and unsympathetic minds pore over my writings, often going back for decades, trying to find passages that they can claim have offended them. What actually offends them is the discovery that anyone disagrees with them.

Individuals like me must therefore be humiliated, silenced and, in the end, destroyed and forgotten.

People will travel long distances, and make great efforts, to be offended or insulted in this way. They rifle through ancient archives to uncover remarks made in a less censorious age, so that they can repeat them and demand the punishment of their authors.

The claim to have been affronted in some way is now the unanswerable charge, by which people such as me will eventually be thrust out of society into a silenced and despised outer darkness, where we will be heard and seen no more. We will, in my view, be lucky if we do not end up being led away in handcuffs, while former colleagues jeer at our humiliation.

You think this is exaggerated or alarmist? I am not so sure. Read on.

This crushing process happens in all revolutionary states. From the French Revolution onwards, half the purpose of the new regime has been to destroy – often physically – the idea that things might ever have been done differently.

I used to wonder, during my long years travelling in the Communist world, what the point was of the everpresent red banners proclaiming the mythical glories of socialism amid actual shortages and secret police repression. Who could be fooled by these crimson lies?

And then it was explained to me: the whole point of these banners and posters and portraits of Lenin and

Marx was to demoralise and isolate the dissenter. They proclaimed: ‘We have won. We are in charge. Our lies are now the truth. You can do nothing about it. Nobody cares what you think.’

And so it is with the rainbow flags. Britain is full of people who have never wholly agreed with the great sexual revolution which has overtaken us in the past 30 years, and is now embraced by the Conservative Party and the churches.

But even in private they hesitate to say so – in fact, they may even say roughly the opposite of what they secretly think. For they know a terrible thing. If they are denounced, they could lose their livelihoods, as dangerous a threat in its own way as the threat of imprisonment once was.

Fifty years ago it never really crossed my mind that this could happen here.

I have at my elbow twin Penguin paperbacks of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, both bought and first read by me in 1967 when I was 15 or 16.

They are cracked and frayed from much rereading. Both, enjoyably, are priced at three shillings and sixpence, in the old unmodernised, monarchist currency which those of us who once used it all miss, as a symbol of a lost way of life.

Heavens – how free, and how carefree we were then. I won’t even try to translate this price into today’s tin coinage. It would be like trying to render Shakespeare into the babble of a Radio 1 DJ. It was a completely different thing from what we have now, like so much else from that time.

In the messy, unmodernised world of shillings and pence, you see, we felt quite safe from the horrors which Huxley and Orwell predicted. We had no idea what was coming.

Interestingly, both these horrible utopias – one a Communist police state, the other a drugged, familyfree, religion-free pleasure dome – use the metric and decimal systems.

The vast laboratories in which Huxley’s mass-produced babies are brought to life are measured in metres. Beer, in Orwell’s dismal totalitarian London, is sold only in litres, and paid for in dollars and cents. I am sure both men did this quite deliberately. They knew that world-reformers have a passion for chilly neatness, and hate the irregular and the old.

So there is that. And there is the great question of which of these prophecies has come true, and which is the more frightening. The unwelcome answer is that both are coming true together, and that they are equally frightening. The rainbow

Two beloved paperbacks. Two horrid utopias. Both now relentlessly coming true